The Ugly Volvo

An Actual Conversation We Had This Morning

2012-04-20T03:18:30Z

So I go to the tub this morning to see a tiny black bug—no bigger than a tomato seed and teardrop shaped—crawling around near the drain of our white bathtub. And so I call Jonathan and say, “Hey—there’s one of those tiny little black bugs under the bathtub faucet. Can you get him out of the tub so he doesn’t drown when I take a shower?” And so he lets the bug crawl onto a little square of toilet paper, lifts it up, and then deposits it…on the other side of the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why are you putting him right back in the bathroom??”

“If I put him in the living room he could get killed.”

“Why would you put him in the living room??”

“Ok, then where do you want me to put him??”

“You can’t put him outside?”

“It’s still pretty cold outside. And this type of bug likes to be in the bathroom. I always find them in the bathroom.”

“I think it probably would have been fine outside. Whatever type of bug it is evolved before the invention of bathrooms, so it’s probably ok living in…you know…the regular environment.”

Jon pauses for a minute, pondering this and then says:

“Ok, you may have a point.” And he walks off to do something on his computer.

They grow up so fast

2011-10-07T14:04:34Z

My mother and I are sitting in her glacier-colored Volkswagon Passat, outside a Panera Bread in the parking lot of a strip mall. She is on her lunch break from work. I drove to her office to pick her up and take her out to lunch but now we are at a standstill in the parked car and she is shaking her head, biting her lower lip, telling me she wants to go inside, but we can’t go inside because of my fleece jacket.

“Why?” I ask her.

“Because it looks dirty. And I don’t want people to see you wearing a dirty fleece.”

“It’s not dirty.”

“I didn’t say it was dirty, I said it looks dirty.”

“It’s just a little pilly,” I said, pulling off one of the pills with my fingers. “But it’s not dirty—I just washed it. And who’s going to see me wearing it?”

“Who knows,” my mother offers. “I work a few blocks away—there could be people there from the office. Or someone from church.”

“We haven’t been to church in twelve years.”

“Even worse,” she says. “First they’ll wonder why we haven’t been to church and then they’ll see you in that fleece and think you don’t wash your clothes.”

“Ok first off,” I say, “You are being ridiculous. I love you because you are my mother and I want to eat lunch with you, but you are being completely ridiculous. And secondly, even if I wanted to go home and change fleeces we don’t have time if you have to be back at work in an hour.”

My mother pauses, thoughtful. This is the hard part. The hard part for me is that she is not malicious or evil—it would be much easier to just have a horrible mother that I could hate with abandon but my mother is not cruel or unfeeling, she is simply omnipresent and easily embarrassed. If someone were to ask me, “Would you rather have a wonderful, heartfelt talk with your mother or throw her out a fifth story window?” I would reply, “Yes.”

“Here,” she says suddenly. “Take my jacket.” She is tugging her arms out of the sleeves, disengaging herself from the jacket in the awkward confines of the car.

“I can’t take your jacket—what are you going to wear?”

“I’ll just be cold,” she says. “I’d rather be cold than have you go in there with that fleece.”

“I really don’t want your jacket,” I tell her sheepishly.

“I’m fine,” she says, rubbing her hands together enthusiastically, her upper arms sporting a shallow layer of goose pimples. “I’ll just order something warm.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to wear your jacket.”

“What’s wrong with my jacket?”

“It’s a petite jacket,” I tell her, “and the sleeves are up to here on me.” I make a motion with my hand at where the sleeves will hit, which is approximately two inches past my elbow. “It’s not going to fit me. I’m going to look like a giant.”

“You can pretend they’re three quarter length sleeves,” she says cheerfully. And it’s the “cheerfully” that kills me. Because it’s the “cheerfully” that is my mother saying, “Look, Kelly, I’ve FIXED this! I’ve fixed it and found a way for us to go out to lunch together and please don’t ruin it!” when I want to cry out that it was her disdain for my recently-washed-but-pilly-fleece that created this situation in the first place. But even while oblivious to her role in the problem, she is desperate for a solution because deep in her loving, well-intentioned, easily embarrassed heart, she wants very much to go out to lunch with me because she loves me. And deep in my crazily screaming, frustrated heart, I feel the same way.

“It’s not just the sleeves,” I tell her. “It’s a petite jacket. And I don’t like it—I would never wear this jacket.”

“Just try it on,” she says.

And angrily, begrudgingly, I take off my fleece and put on the petite navy blue suit jacket which obviously, obviously does not fit, and which looks ridiculous. I am five foot-nine, wearing a suit jacket that would need only slight tailoring to fit either a Wizard of Oz munchkin or a five year-old, my long, Frankenstein-like arms protruding from the sleeves.

“It doesn’t fit.”

“It looks fine,” my mother says happily. She has unlocked the doors and is already getting out of the car.

She is happily walking toward Panera, chatting away—telling me that last time she got French Onion Soup in a bread bowl but that she is trying to watch her weight and that maybe she will get a salad. I walk behind her awkwardly, the suit jacket pinching around my armpits.

I am thirty years old, wearing a blazer that would fit a Kindergartener. It looks as though I started out the morning as a child, my mother dressing me for elementary school picture day, saying “let’s put on your good blue blazer for the pictures,” and now here we are only a few hours later and I am wearing the same clothes, but have somehow aged 25 years and grown a foot and a half taller. I look, frustrated, up at my mother and she looks longingly back at me and I realize, in a way, that that is exactly what has happened.

Can't Even Deal With This Right Now

2011-09-05T15:39:45Z

So I'm at work and it's slow at the restaurant. Which is fine. It's been slow lately. And our hostess is-- we'll say she's "not the brightest light on the tree" or "the sharpest tack in the box." The other day when I asked where the copying machine was she led me to it and then said, "good luck figuring it out. It's got like tons of buttons an shit," after which I inserted my paper in the completely run-of-the-mill copying machine, hit "copy" and received my desired result.

Ok. So you know who we're working with.

I'm there yesterday and the one thing this hostess rarely does is host. She quietly and begrudingly takes people to tables and aloofly hands them menus if they happen to show up. But that's it. Often I will find customers standing at the door, looking lost and I will ask, "Are you folks being helped?" And they will say, "I'm not sure. The hostess saw us but then she just walked away." She seems to think, if she thinks at all, that the entirety of the hosting job consists of wearing eyeliner and cute belts.

This hostess "hosts" for about 10 minutes out of her 7 hour shift. The rest of the time she is busy doing other things. She has, in the past few months, read all of the Twilight novels and had in depth texting conversations that have lasted for hours. She has downloaded and played every game that can be put onto a phone. Once, when we found her in the kitchen helping out by carrying a stack of plates, one of the busboys commented in disbelief, "What are you doing back here? Did your iPhone break?" In one of the reviews of our restaurant a guest said they were sort of taken aback that when they arrived the hostess was on Facebook.

I am not entirely certain why she still works there.

And I should specify that, in fairness, being a hostess can be a very boring job. There is not a terribly large amount of things to do when it is not busy, and if one's mind is not occupied it can be a bit maddening. Ok. There. So that's my devil's advocate paragraph.

That being said, I walk in yesterday and am busy setting up the tables when I notice that she has taken a pair of hot pink denim shorts out of a plastic bag. And I figure they are something she purchased before coming to work and she is just taking them out, admiring her purchase. Fine, right? Of course. No biggie. And it is not until an hour or so later that I see her hunched over the host desk with a set of pliers, the magenta shorts in her lap. And I had NO idea what was going on so I waited until she left the host stand before I walked over and discovered that she was using a pair of pliers to attach 3/8 inch gold stud spikes to the crotch of her denim shorts.

Which means she had to wake up and say, "Ok-- I'm finished with the Stephanie Meyer novels and I'm not interesting in ever reading another book again as long as I live. And everyone I want to text is either roaming or out of the country or dead right now. And my facebook has been temporarily disabled. Why don't I go to work, bringing this pair of hot pink denim shorts, gold studs, and pliers in a plastic Shop Rite bag and I can attach these studs to the crotch of the shorts in my down time at work while sitting at the very front of the restaurant in full view of everyone?"

And that's exactly what she did-- there's no moral or lesson or quick summation about something I learned. Just sheer disbelief that not only did this happen, I was the only one who appeared to notice.

There is a lot about the world that I do not understand, apparently.

Job Hunting

2011-08-30T20:41:04Z

I am perusing Craigslist like I do far too often, always searching for the job that will make me perfectly content and fulfilled and not require working weekends and holidays and also, ideally, I am allowed to bring my dog. A 9-5 job in a place where I can wear sneakers and ratty T-shirts, where they are in the midst of trying something called “Dress UP Fridays” which allows me an excuse to dress up once a week without having to own more than one pair of pantyhose, and where there is the perfect amount of physical activity and the perfect amount of rest and where they pay enough that I can afford to buy groceries without fumbling through my pockets for nickels and crying. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? And I scroll through the website, beginning in hotel/restaurant jobs, and then moving to customer service, writing, admin, part time and always ending on the category called “ETC,” with the hope that that is where I’ll find my perfect employment—something that cannot be categorized. I know that whatever I am looking for does not exist, but something about the title, “ETC,” makes you feel as though you could find anything—as though the real is mixed in with the unreal--that after an ad looking for someone in part time textbook sales there will be an ad looking for a front desk receptionist at the Ministry of Magic and yes (amazing!) you can bring the dog and be home by 5:30.

I am sitting on my sofa, my laptop sitting on a flattened throw pillow. I am always intimidated by the job requirements. NYC’s Coolest Music Website is seeking fall interns but already I know that I am the type of person who will never work for NYC’s Coolest Music Website because I will never be involved with anything that defines itself as cool, the same way I will not respond to the ad entitled, “Wanted: Bartenders, Shotgirls and Dancers,” because the one time I was even tangentially involved in that sort of atmosphere I had a customer tell me that for a cocktail waitress I looked very science-y, which means, to the uninitiated, that I was wearing glasses and walking with an uncertain, insecure hunch to my shoulders. This is not something that traditionally makes people purchase shots of Jagermeister.

I do not want to be a Spa Coordinator at a high end medical spa and I do not stand a chance applying to KOREAN SPEAKING FEMALE F/T OFFICE ASSISTANT. I see little future as an Egg Donor or a dog walker on the Upper East Side (1 year commitment!) or as someone who could “Get Paid to Evaluate Banks!” I am not a person suffering from Lupus pain who could be involved in a focus group and I am in no way responding to an ad declaring, “Girls with Pretty Feet Needed! 18-30!”

I think back to every high school and elementary school classroom I ever sat in, staring blankly at the walls, and try to remember if they prepared us for this. I remember sitting in science class, next to a couple—a boy and a girl who were sucking on lollipops that the other was holding and I remember my teacher talking about the big bang and how everything exploded outward. How everything in the universe was packed into a spot of unimaginable density which somehow ripped open with an ungodly blast and somehow became the universe. And of course some kid raised his hand and asked “How small was it before it exploded?” and I can’t imagine she really knew that, but our teacher told us it was about the size of a period on a page. And I immediately thought of how much pressure it would take to squish the entire universe into something that size. I thought of the tin foil ball discarded from my lunch, and how even after crushing it with the heel of my hand, I wasn’t able to make it any smaller than a large marble. Now add to that the tin foil sandwich wrapping of all the other kids in the cafeteria, plus the children themselves and all of their backpacks and their lollipops.

And that’s not even the beginning of it, because you have to take into account all the tables from the lunchroom, and the lunch ladies, and the teachers in other classrooms, and the chalkboards and metal desks. You would need to condense the white water fountains and the principal’s office and the principal himself, and then of course my parents and relatives and all the people and buildings and landscapes in every country in the entire world. And then, of course, everything in space.
And I remember being exhausted by it—pushing that ball of tin foil smaller and smaller and knowing that I would never get anywhere close to what it had once been. To being awed by the bigness of the world and the smallness of its past and by the force that could condense so much into so small a space.

And ok, so here’s where I’m not entirely sure how that helps me applying to jobs although admittedly, mastering Microsoft Excel is less intimidating than condensing all matter down to a single speck. But the world is happening, regardless of whether or not I send out resumes to anyone. The universe is continually expanding, or at least this is what my science teacher was telling people, and at some point it will begin contracting again, and all of this will happen even if I never accomplish anything and even if I accomplish a thousand things and go far and beyond anyone’s expectations. And so the universe continues to stretch and I continue to scroll through Craigslist, stopping on one of the writing jobs and sending them a resume even though I do not think I am as qualified as they would like me to be. But I will get the job or I won’t, and there’s no point worrying about it. I pour myself a glass of grapefruit juice and lie back on my sofa. I look out at the afternoon sky and imagine condensing the birds and the treetops and the tall lights of the nearby baseball field into a tiny spot the size of a grain of sand. And everything else, of course—the highway overpass and the tractor trailer that is crossing it at this moment, and my laptop and throw pillow, and Craig himself, wherever he is, with his list of jobs and furniture for sale and missed connections. All of this will be pummeled into obscurity by unimaginable forces. And so, I convince myself, it doesn’t matter if I get a good job or not. But then I watch additional cars speeding across the overpass and glance at a bird alighting on the top of the chain link fence and realize that none of these things is going anywhere for a while—the birds and the cars and the overpass and Craig, or at least the legacy of his list, will be around for decades to come—maybe more. And I, if I play my cards right, will be around as well. So if I want to make something of my life, now, I realize, would be the time to do it.

Biting my lip with uncertainty I paste my resume into the body of an e-mail.

Crossing my fingers I hit “send,” and collapse, exhausted, overwhelmed, into the couch.

I don't know a whole lot about Bolivia

2011-08-16T21:00:57Z

If you had asked me 24 hours earlier what the Bolivian flag looked like I would have shrugged my shoulders and said, “I have no idea.” I knew that Argentina’s flag is light blue and white stripes (like their soccer uniforms) with a sun in the center and I know that Brazil’s is green, with that yellow diamond holding some sort of planet full of stars. But Bolivia—I had no idea.

I was sitting with Jonathan at an outdoor café, the dog’s leash tied to the leg of our wooden folding table, the dog lapping water out of a clear plastic salad container that the waitress had brought for her. The café is in a well maintained old building—a restored antique—and everything is covered in a coat of white paint. There are enormous windows and a pink and brown awning and outside, piped in quietly through the speakers, is the sound of Louis Armstrong. Everyone at the surrounding tables is in his or her late 20’s or 30’s and appears artsy but well off financially—they work in marketing or advertising, maybe. Or maybe the men are in IT and the women are assistant editors at some company in Manhattan. Anyone with a baby has the baby in a conspicuously expensive stroller or else the child is sitting on its father’s shoulders, its legs covering the G-Star logo of his distressed T-shirt. Mainly it is just couples—the girls all wearing large, fashionable sunglasses and the boys wearing aviators. I sit, drinking tea out of an enormous mug, looking at Jonathan.

And that is when someone starts blowing a whistle.

And it isn’t an accusatory, “No running by the pool!” whistle or a “Somebody stop that man!” whistle—it’s a series of staccato beats and it is followed by the sound of horns blowing, and after that, of reed flutes. And everyone at the café turns, slowly, as if we are all extras in a mid-90’s Meg Ryan movie and something funny is happening. And suddenly we notice that policemen are clearing away the cars and blocking off the street and Jon whispers “It’s the Bolivian Parade. It’s always in early August.” And we get up to look and a block away there is a department of Public Works vehicle that is pulling a flatbed trailer with a woman in a sequined dress whose sash says, “Miss Bolivia USA,” and she is surrounded by other people in good dress clothes who are waving and smiling. The trailer looks like something you would rent from Home Depot to lug materials to a building site, but today Miss Bolivia USA is on it, waving, and I feel a little bad that she is so dressed up in her crown and blue sequins and she is standing on something that looks like it is on loan from a farming community.

Louis Armstrong is at this point completely drowned out and so Jon and I pay the check and decide we will quickly cross the road to watch a little of the parade. A group of children, mostly girls, in traditional Bolivian dress march down Grove street, led by a small boy with a crewcut whose traditional outfit is accented by mirrored Oakley sunglasses. The outfits are black and heavy and have elaborately puffed sleeves with red and gold and green decorations and sequins dripping from the fabric. The children are smiling and clearly ecstatic to be part of the parade, and I feel bad that there are so few people watching. Most people of Bolivian heritage are participating in the parade, it seems, which means that the audience is composed of older Bolivian relatives holding Bolivian infants, people from other South American countries who are enjoying the music, and “people who happened to be walking down the street and are trying to figure out what the hell’s going on.”

Another enthusiastic group follows the Oakley-clad eight year old and this group is older, consisting mainly of men. Each group is led by a truck filled with enough speakers to fill a studio apartment, blaring traditional music that seems to consist mainly of horns, drums, and occasionally reed-type flutes. The outfits are similarly eccentric—dark purple puffed sleeves and bright metallic buttons. Jackets with broad shoulders and sequined pants and tall boots that are covered in thick rows of golf ball-sized jingle bells. And the men do an elaborate dance that involves inordinate amounts of kicking, rattling the enormous bells that cover their boots like loud, festive boils. There is one man with gel in his short, curly hair who is incredibly confident—he is grinning, showing off his bright white television announcer teeth, and throwing his head back dramatically, cocking one eyebrow and making love to the audience as he dances and jumps and makes his boots rattle. And beside him is a boy of about seventeen who is almost six feet tall but looks as though he has not yet adjusted to his size—he has braces and a round, babyish head and continually looks at his feet and the feet of the man next to him, trying to make sure they are in sync. He is trying desperately to remember the steps, his legs stomping the ground a half second after the others, his arms awkwardly trying to remember the movements while he sweats—everyone is sweating because the costumes are heavy and it is close to 100 degrees outside. And I am clapping and feeling bad that they have gone through the trouble of putting on these elaborate costumes and memorizing these elaborate dances and that there are so few people watching.

Next a group of unlabeled Bolivian men in suits walks by, smiling and waving at the crowd and it is during this lull in excitement that a woman pushing a baby stroller covered in Bolivian flags quickly crosses the road and two vendors selling Dora the Explorer and Spongebob Squarepants balloons make their way toward the bandstand at the end of the parade route. A woman in shorts and sunglasses casually walks out into the parade the way you would step out into a river, letting the water divert its flow around your ankles. She takes a picture and leaves.

I clap loudly and cheer and notice that the crowd of spectators is growing. As groups complete the parade they join those on the sidelines. The children from the first group are standing alongside the road now, drinking orange sodas from cans, still wearing their sunglasses, and the dancers with the bells are cheering and the men in suits are standing on the sidelines smiling. Miss Bolivia USA is standing atop the bandstand, clapping as a new group makes its way down the parade route—women with long, brown braids and short, fluffy, tu-tu-type skirts which they shake back and forth followed by men wearing masks with bald heads followed by costumes that are round and tiered and make their inhabitants look like neurotic wedding cakes. A man walks by, hands thrown in the air, in a large fluffy costume whose animal head makes him look like the squirrel-rat creature from the Ice Age movies, but who, upon further reflection, is probably a sloth. Walking devotedly alongside him is a much smaller sloth of about five years of age who has taken off his sloth mask because he is hot and sweaty and who carries it in his left hand while looking up with admiration at the larger sloth, who he obviously idolizes. The big sloth looks down lovingly at the little sloth and grabs his free hand, smiling and shouting and dancing in a circle until the little sloth begins smiling and dancing as well. The sloths are followed by women in woolen shawls and tiny South American bowler hats that appear to be pinned to their heads, who are in turn followed by more elaborately dressed men who ooze enthusiasm—each man holding a helmet-type hat in his right hand that vaguely resembles a giant hazelnut and jumping ridiculously high into the air, hitting the helmets against the ground with a synchronized “clunk,” before leaping back into the ether. They are energetic and infectious and suddenly one of the older men in the khaki suits runs back into the parade and positions himself at the head of the hazelnut helmet troupe, dancing along with them. He is throwing himself up as his arms go up and down as his legs stomp their energy into Grove street, his Khaki suit pants growing dark from sweat. And then suddenly, for no reason, I am crying. Tears are flowing from my eyes and I don’t look at Jon, because I don’t want him to see that I’m crying during the Parade. I am self-conscious that I will look like an idiot, and I am dismayed because at first I cannot figure out WHY I am crying. When I was very young I cried when I hurt myself or when I thought about my parents dying or once, when I watched “The Fox and the Hound,” when the hound takes a stand, placing himself between the Fox and the hunter’s gun. And then I got older and hormones kicked in and I cried constantly—I cried at the scene in Free Willy where the whale jumps over a rock wall to escape back out to sea and I thought, “Ok, this is pretty pathetic,” which it was, but here I was twenty years later, crying at the East Coast Bolivian Heritage Parade and not even knowing why.

And I tell Jon, “Ok, we’ve stayed long enough. Let’s take the dog to the dog park before it starts to rain,” and he says, “Sure,” and I feel mildly guilty that we are leaving, since I want people to be there to watch the parade since everyone has clearly worked so so hard and they are dancing and sweating and smiling as if the whole thing is being filmed for NBC, which of course it is not. There will maybe be a small article about the parade in the Jersey Journal, which I only ever read when I am using the bag it comes in to pick up my dog’s feces.

And I walk away and suddenly see a giant hurricane of rainbow confetti fill the street and it suddenly hits me that the well-choreographed Bolivians of the east coast aren’t upset with anyone for leaving or for not coming in the first place and they don’t need anyone to be there but themselves—that this was less of a poorly attended play and more of a flamboyant family reunion. And I couldn’t pinpoint the exact thing that made me realize it but it was something about those sequined men with the hazelnut helmets leaping and crashing enthusiastically into the macadam-- rocketing into the air, joyously oblivious to anything. And the man in the Khaki suit jumping down off the bandstand and joining in, and they were clearly having so much fun and were so happy and whatever stupid part of me cried when Free Willy jumped over the wall to Freedom began crying at the Bolivian parade as I realized how happy they were. And so I went to walk the dog, which is a small, muted sort of happiness, and I held Jonathan’s hand, which is a happiness of the same sort—my happiness tends to be quaint and quiet, involving cafes and Louis Armstrong and reading a book.
And as we walked away we listened to the clamor of horns and drums and flutes. Behind us the confetti swirled through the street and the participants of the parade marched forward proudly and various children waved Bolivian Flags (which, for the record, are red yellow and green with a small crest in the center) desperately hoping that in an upcoming year they would be participating—dancing and sweating with their families— rather than sitting on the sidelines.

Something That Happened With My Rabbits

2011-08-02T18:04:13Z

I walk down Newark avenue and Tig starts pulling at her leash when we are three buildings away from Village Tropical—the small, crowded, pet store on the corner. There is a new place a few buildings away that is a combination Doggie Day Care and trendy dog supply store. It sells hip, urban dog clothes, and designer collars and leashes which are just regular collars and leashes with expensive grosgrain ribbon sewn onto them, but Tig doesn’t care about the new Doggie Day care place for whatever reason, she is only interested in going to Village Tropical. And my first instinct is to say, “She likes going to Village Tropical because the owner’s Chihuahua is always running around and because there is a large gray cat that she both hates and is fascinated by, but I am not really certain why she prefers one over the other.

When I was younger I was equally enamored with small, crowded pet stores and would pull my mother’s arm taut, pleading that she allow us in to look at the animals, that she allow us to look at the puppies. Not that I thought she would buy me a puppy, because I knew she wouldn’t, but looking at them and holding them brought a sweet, transitory pleasure, like having a baby smiling at you. It doesn’t have to be your baby to enjoy watching it laugh and it doesn't need to be your puppy to enjoy having it pounce at your feet, and so I sat in the small gated booth where I pretended I was considering buying it, watching it stand awkwardly on my lap. I smiled, longingly, watching as it tried to balance on my shifting thighs, its tiny needle-like claws fumbling for a grip on my neon orange shorts.

Village Tropical is not as nice as the pet stores of my youth, but it feels the same in that it reminds me more of a dollar store than a boutique. In one window display there are three neon blue signs that say “PETS PETS PETS” and in the front there are two additional signs that say, “PET SUPPLIES” and “PET SHOP,” surrounded by sun-faded posters for Holistic Select Dog Food: Simple, Natural Solutions for Food Allergies and Food Intolerance. A piece of computer paper has been taped to the door with a list of do’s and don’ts typed in Arial Bold. The first line reads: Shirt and Shoes Required!!! The next reads, “No dogs or other animals in the store,” but someone has drawn a small arrow and inserted the word “sick” between “no” and “dogs.” And following that it announces that there is no food or drinks allowed, and, in a somewhat dated reference, “No rollerblades.” In the window is a box labeled “Enclosed Cat Pan!” and a kit that allows you to build a koi pond easily in your backyard.

Tig and I walk in. Or I should specify that most of the time we don’t walk in. Most of the time we walk right past it on the way to the grocery store or the post office, Tig’s feet helplessly scrambling the way the characters in Scooby Doo scramble when they are climbing a set of stairs that mysteriously turns into a ramp—their legs circle frantically in the same place until they realize their efforts are futile and they slide down in a ball of cartoonish dust. But today we walk in because I am looking for a harness for Tig, so we walk in, past the displays of plastic fishtank plants and the bulletin board plastered with kittens and cats needing adoption. We squeeze into the left-most aisle where the harnesses are—where the leashes and collars are hanging in a colorful clump, like a tangled mass of hair. None of the leashes are tangled in the new doggie day care place—each one hangs neatly beside the next—uniform, like linguini emerging from a pasta maker. But at Village Tropical everything is tangled and usually dirty, which is fine because it is a pet store and owning animals does not lend itself to cleanliness. When we first got Tig we came here to get supplies—I found a set of stainless steel bowls in partially collapsed box that was thick with dust, as if someone had taken the lint from their dryer and lain it across the merchandise. I brought it to the counter and said, “Is this the only one you have?” even thought I knew it was, and the extremely overweight woman with permed black hair who is attached to an oxygen tank held up the bowls and said, “Mickey, tell me if we’ve got any more of these.” And a man who was presumably Mickey walked into the pet bowl aisle and re-appeared 30 seconds later shaking his head, saying, “It’s fifteen, but we can give it to you for eleven.”

Everything in Village Tropical is crowded together with little rhyme or reason—the organizational motto of the store appears to be, “Just put it somewhere for now.” There is a display of studded harnesses hung above a poster for something called “Angel Eyes,” which eliminates tear stains for small, light colored dogs. There are wedges made from corrugated cardboard labeled as “Alpine Scratchers,” beside a large jar of peacock feathers, and opposite that there is a rotating display for aquarium backdrops. The backdrops are bright, colorful posters, intended to fool your fish into thinking that it is swimming through the great barrier reef or the bikini atoll—to make it believe that it is not in a sullen glass tank in a living room in Weehawken. It is a wild fish, free and daring, wily escaping predators. It lives in whatever part of the tropics has beaches lined with tiny blue rocks and plastic mermaids, a chest of buried treasure lifting its lid every fifteen seconds to release a stream of bubbles beside a miniature underwater sign that reads, “No Fishing.”

I patiently untangle the dog harnesses and place all but one back on the display rack and as I do I notice, next to them, a tiny leash and harness combo fashioned over a piece of shaped cardboard, labeled, “Rabbit Leash.” I am struck by the design of the rabbit leash because I purchased this exact one when I was a child and either the rabbit leash company has never in its history tampered with its design and packaging, or this leash has been sitting in Village Tropical, unsold, since 1991. Both options, I realize, seem feasible.

My sisters and I weaned our mother onto the idea of having pets. First the fish, which I won at my elementary school fair by throwing a red rubber ball into a floating glass bowl. The ball went in smoothly, without hitting the rim, and the woman running the booth gave me a slip which entitled me to one free goldfish at Pets Place 2. I brought it home to my mother who was fond of sayings such as, “Of course you can have a fish--for dinner tonight.”

“I won a fish,” I told her.
“I bet you did.”
“Can I get one?”
“I don’t know? Can you?”
“May I get a fish?”
“I don’t know,” she said, with predictable hesitation. “I don’t know if you’re old enough for the responsibility.”
“Can I please get one and I’ll take care of it?” I asked, handing her the small white slip of paper.

And miraculously, after a minimal amount of sarcastic banter she said, “I want to make it very clear that I’m not going to feed it and I’m not going to clean its bowl and if you don’t clean out its bowl regularly I’ll throw it into the toilet. But if you think you can keep it clean, you can have a fish.”

And so we got Phinneus, whose bowl with its fake plastic plant sat on top of the refrigerator. And a year later I turned ten. And asked if I could have a rabbit. And she said yes.

There are rabbits in the back of Village Tropical, huddled in cages that are stacked on top of the Guinea Pig cages, placed next to a three story enclosure that sometimes houses ferrets and sometimes houses chinchillas. Tig is always very excited about the rabbits but is never sure what to do with her excitement, which is similar to how I felt at ten years old, picking one out at Pet Palace in the Spring Valley Marketplace. You are excited because it is a living thing and it is cute and small and you are in charge of it, but there is nothing to do with a rabbit besides hold it, having it occasionally urinate down the front of your shirt. And so I got a rabbit and heeding the unwritten rule that pre-adolescent girls must give their rabbits incredibly unimaginative names, I named it Flipsy. And I bought the rabbit leash with the little brass knob that adjusts the length, and learned that you cannot “walk” a rabbit any more than you can walk a goldfish. Fastening the loops around Flipsy’s front and back legs, I would tug ceaselessly while she stood motionless on the lawn, patiently chewing mouthfuls of grass.

“Come!” I would yell, to no avail. Rabbits are much like deaf people and young children in that they do not heed verbal commands. Occasionally I would pull her gently, lugging her across the yard like a fat bag of soup, but it was never the outing I had envisioned.

Flipsy lived in a rabbit cage under the deck for a few months, after which she pushed out the wooden side of the cage and ran away, breaking my heart. And my mother, whose heart had suddenly grown three sizes, felt so bad for me that she allowed me to get two baby flop-eared rabbits, brother and sister, who lived in a new, more durable cage under the deck, and spent their time eating alfalfa and having sex with each other.

“Maybe we should put them in different cages,” I suggested, and my father, after observing their regular bouts of lapine incest, bought a second cage and put it next to the first cage. Two weeks later I walked down after breakfast to check on them and found the female rabbit in a cage strewn with seven baby rabbits. She had pulled out clumps of her fur to build a nest but, my family not knowing she was pregnant, we had failed to put a box or container with a solid bottom into the cage and the babies squirmed horrifically, their feet dangling through the bottom of the wire cage, their bodies writhing as clumps of fur flew like frantic tumbleweeds throughout the enclosure. Their mother, who was herself only a few months old hopped throughout the bedlam. I opened the spring latch on the door and tried to pull her out, but she bit me on the finger and I quickly closed the door, horrified. The babies looked like hybrid creatures—halfway between demons and rats, and one, near the door of the cage, opened its small mouth, screaming silently. I looked at the bright red of his back and his head and realized that he was missing a large patch of dark gray skin. I looked, horrified at his mother. She was eating him.

I ran inside to tell my mother what had happened and her face fell and her mouth became a straight line and she said, “She’s too young. She knows she’s too young to take care of them. I’m sorry, Kelly.” And I said, “What can we do?” and she said, “We can’t do anything,” which was horrible and sad but, in retrospect, true. And I cried, horrified, but the bus was arriving in ten minutes and I had to go to school. I sat, thinking of the rabbits all day and when I got home I ran straight from the bus stop to the rabbit hutch without even going inside to tell my mother I was home. I ran to the hutch and the floor of the cage looked like a battlefield littered with tiny corpses, many with their skin or ears bitten off. I cried into my mother’s arms and my mother, who had been prepared to nag me about unfreezing the rabbits’ waterbottles in winter or to console me when they eventually passed away, was not fully prepared for this.

“Having animals is messy,” she said, as calmly as she could muster. “They’re not people. You can’t expect them to act like people. They’re going to do things you’re not going to understand.” And I swallowed the lump in my throat as my mother hugged me and my father, outside, blanketed by the darkness of the evening, emptied the cage and stoically disposed of the babies.

I take the harness to the counter at Village Tropical and the woman with the oxygen tank says, “14.99” and I pay her. Tig is staring, fascinated, at the large grey cat which is lying, curled up in a box of rawhide bones. The woman goes to put the harness in a bag and I say, “It’s fine, I don’t need it,” and she immediately sits down on the metal folding chair behind the counter and goes back to her romance novel. She has a very tan chest and is wearing a red, scoopneck top with little blue beads embroidered around the neckline, and the beads remind me of the rocks lining the floor of the aquarium beside me. It is filled with tiny neon fish swimming against a backdrop of an elaborate coral reef. The fish are not fooled by the poster of the reef, if they can see it at all, and no one owning a fishtank is fooled by the poster of the reef and maybe it would be better if someone wanting fish kept them somewhere less deceitful, like a bathtub or an empty apple juice bottle. Something that cried out, “I want to own fish, even though I cannot in any way re-create their natural environment.” Above the aquarium is an index card thumbtacked to a shelf that reads, “Do not touch or tap the tanks,” and beside that is a random box of Pig Ear chew treats and beside that is a container of turtle food.

“Having animals is messy,” my mother explained calmly. It is exciting, but it is also messy. Village Tropical is thrilling in all its disorganization. I think of myself pulled by unseen forces toward the cages of puppies in the mall and I think of Tig straining for the Rabbit cages, filled with a desperate canine unknowing. Life, for whatever reason, is excited by life.

I drag Tig out through the doorway, her body straining against the leash, every fiber in her being wanting to stay in the grimy, jumbled petstore with its uneven, damp smell. She glances once more at the gray cat and I glance one more at the woman immersed in her novel, the plastic oxygen tube encircling her neck, a sweaty lock of hair plastered to her wide forehead. Tig whimpers and I sigh. I say, “Tig, come!” and she reluctantly but obediently walks toward me. We close the door behind us and the brown Chihuahua sits in the glass window, looking at us longingly, watching us walk away.

Testing

2011-07-26T15:58:53Z

I always feel out of place proctoring tests at the nearby catholic high school because everybody is either a teenager, a heavyset bleached blonde woman, or a nun. There is a spattering of Franciscan brothers and one or two non-religious male teachers, but everyone is either in the midst of their adolescence or in their early to mid 50’s, so my being there never really makes sense to anyone. I am thirty years-old, smack in the middle of everyone, and when I come in, when the main office buzzes me into the school the teachers always go, “Hi, can we help you?” which means “You are too old to be a student and too young to be a parent and you are obviously not a delivery man so what are you doing here?”

And I say, “I’m with SAT prep—I’m here to proctor the mock exam.” And the teachers make a face like, “Ohhh, of course,” and start walking down the hallway, fumbling for the janitorial ring of keys which every teacher in this school seems to have. It has been twelve years since I was in high school but all high schools seem to look more or less the same. There are heavy wooden doors and floors that always appear to have been mopped in the past 10 minutes and endless cinderblock hallways painted a light, canary yellow. I don’t know why they always paint the walls that color but probably it’s supposed to be calming. When I was very young I used to walk along the walls, dragging my finger in the lines between the bricks until a teacher told me to stop doing it, saying the walls would make my hands dirty. The hallways have no windows and are lit by a recurring fluorescent rectangle every few panels in the drop ceiling, or by the sunlight that streams in through one of the classroom doors, if one is opened. The schools always seem dark and the walls always seem endless but once in a while a piece of the wall will be painted over in a mural or there will be a bulletin board with so-so student artwork or a trophy case with filled with seemingly epic accomplishments—all-county trophies, photos, medals—against a backdrop of stapled construction paper. In this particular school there is an enormous picture of a hockey team posing on the ice, post-game, grinning and holding an enormous cup high above their heads. The bottom of the photo reveals that it is from 1996, which to the current students must seem ancient—it may as well be from the middle of the 12th century—but it is only 14 years ago. It is the year I was a sophomore. The boys from this photo are probably all working in accounts payable departments in Manhattan or selling dental equipment or working as “online media editors” for companies that did not exist in 1996. Most of them no longer play hockey but some of them have infant children and make their 3 month old sons wear onesies with the New Jersey Devils or Toronto Maple Leafs logo across the chests.

The bleached blonde woman in the magenta V-neck T-shirt goes, “We’ll put you in 103 today,” but upon reaching door 103 finds that the room is being occupied by the football team, whose polo-shirt wearing coach is standing at the blackboard, drawing dozens of curved lines with yellow chalk. The teacher peeks through the square window in the door and sees this and goes, “Nevermind. We’re not going to put you in 103. Let’s see if we can use 106.”

The lockers in this school are the big sort of lockers—the ones they had on television shows like “Saved by the Bell” or “You Can’t Do That on Television,” that nerdy, unpopular students were always being shoved into. There is a girl with a single orange streak in her hair applying mascara and blinking into her locker mirror and underneath the mirror is a photo torn out of a magazine of a young heartthrob-type boy who I do not recognize. She is sucking on a lollipop and I remember being in 6th grade when the Blue Raspberry Charms blowpops were infectiously popular and all the girls had them, even though they turned your mouth a shade of blue that made you look like you were dying of asphyxiation. Girls would sit packed tight around a cafeteria table, gossiping and laughing and sucking on Blowpops with their dark blue lips, looking like fashionable, extremely popular drowning victims.

The woman takes me to 106, which is not locked. She opens the door and there is a nun sitting at the large metal desk, writing something on a yellow legal pad. The nun looks up and I think to myself that there is something very quiet and beautiful about coming upon a nun, alone in a classroom, writing. She looks up at us with a calm, innocent face, like a deer.
“Hi,” she says, and I say “Hi,” and she smiles. I have met this nun before, at the SAT program sign up, where I was sitting behind a table and she was meandering through the hall. She had stopped briefly at my table to say hello and how was I doing, and a woman signing up her 16 year old son for the SAT program looked at the nun and then looked at me and then looked back at the nun and said, “Are you two…related? Are you sisters?”
And my first thought, with a dramatic sigh, is that clearly I do not dress provocatively enough, and my second thought is that yes, we actually do look a little bit alike when I look closely at her face. She is older, and wearing a floor length black dress and I am wearing khakis and a turtleneck sweater, but judging from our faces it is entirely possible that we are related. I politely tell the woman, “No, we’re not sisters,” and make the joke that, “well actually she is, but I’m not,” and both the woman and the nun get a kick out of this and the woman continues signing her son up for the program.

This particular nun (embarrassingly I do not know her name) seems very nice—not like the Nurse Ratchett-y nuns of my father’s youth that he is always taking about. She is about forty or so with rectangular wire framed glasses. She is wearing flat brown imitation-leather shoes and has a little bit of brown hair peeking out from the front of her habit. She has a small watch on her wrist whose shiny black band is frayed. The watchband has split on the side and you can see that the inside is white like the belly of a fish. The woman with the magenta T-shirt says, “Sorry to bother you, sister. Can we use this room to proctor the test?” and the nun goes, “Oh yes, of course,” and picks up a sheaf of papers from the desktop, placing them in a folder and tucking them into a drawer. I say, “Thank you very much,” and the nun nods, and goes, “Oh, of course,” again, and smiles at me and walks out of the room and I think that of course she gave up her room for me—that is what nuns do. They give things up. They are not supposed to have things, like big bank accounts or stereo systems because they give everything away.

I pull out two pieces of paper with the name of my SAT company. I search the desktop for a marker but there is nothing so I open the upper right hand drawer in the desk. And I have done this many times before, looking for markers or a stapler or tape, but I feel strange doing it because it is a nun’s desk and I do not want to rifle through her things. But I am looking in the drawer and it is identical to the drawers of other teachers, albeit a bit neater. There is a small bottle of purell and a calculator and a post-it note pad and I wonder who the first nun was to use a Post-it note or what nuns use Post-it notes for. Mine at home are stuck on every available surface, screaming reminders such as, “LAUNDRY” or “CALL VERIZON RE: BILL” or “6PM APPT WITH DR. PATEL,” each of which is followed by a string of at least 3 exclamation marks. I imagine that nuns might use them to write down inspirational sayings or quotes that will remind them to love God more. Maybe there is one beside her bed that reads, “Remember to Keep an Open Heart” or one on the mirror where she brushes her teeth that reads “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” And maybe nuns do not have mirrors in front of which they brush their teeth, since they do not want to spend time looking at themselves vainly, but at the same time, how else will they know they have done a really good job brushing? Perhaps they do have mirrors and every once in a while a nun will be overcome with the joy of existence and will watch herself in the mirror, holding her toothbrush like a microphone, lip syncing Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer,” while imagining that she is Gina and God is Tommy. And when she is done she will smile sheepishly and look up to God to forgive her for the outburst. And God will obviously forgive her because it’s not all that terrible of a thing to do, and also the song had the word “prayer” in the title.

Using the nun’s sharpie I write “SAT Mock Exam room 106” on two pieces of paper and using tape (which I also found in the upper right hand drawer) I tape the signs to the two main entrances of the school and then go back to the classroom to wait for students to arrive.

I am not sure how exactly I fell into teaching and proctoring SAT courses, but it is something I am doing for a while to pass the time. I am good at it but not amazing. I did not have a calling to it, the way a nun has a calling. I did not wake up one morning to a blinding ethereal light as the voluptuous clouds parted and a deep voice said, “You have been called to teach,” because I would have asked, “To teach what? What am I called to teach?” and the voice would have responded, “Algebra I and Algebra II and critical reading.” And I would have said, “Really? I who earned B’s and C’s in high school have been called to teach Algebra and critical reading?” And the voice would have cleared its throat awkwardly and said, “Uhhh, yes. And basic geography and grammar. And essay structure,” and I would have narrowed my eyes skeptically, pulling back all the curtains in my house to see if there was anyone standing behind them.

I am standing next to the doorway of the classroom, occasionally running ten feet away to the white porcelain water fountain that is mounted to the wall three feet off the ground. I drink, wetting my perpetually dry lips and walk back to the room and wait as one or two students mills in and sits down. I tell them the test will begin exactly at 3:30. I go back and sit at the desk waiting for more students to arrive and while I am waiting I check for new messages on my Blackberry but there is only a reminder for an Evite that I have already responded to, for a fall-themed party a friend of mine is throwing. I sit and wait as more children—many of them wearing hooded sweatshirts with the name of the school across the chest—meander in and sit at various spots around the room, dropping their Northface backpacks beside their desks. The room is filled with inspirational posters—one with the “Footprints” poem above a picture of a sandy beach and one with a picture of three prarie dogs, two of which look as though they are hugging one another, printed with the words, “The simple act of caring is heroic.” There is a small crucifix hung on the yellow cinderblock wall above the blackboard and over the back bulletin board is the quote, “Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.”

I look again at the kids and out of twelve children, eleven of them are texting and the twelfth is playing with a trendy black rubberband on his wrist which, when removed, reveals itself to be the silhouette of a microphone stand. I cannot imagine what the doe-eyed nun has to say to a class of children who seem so far removed from her—a class of children who use smartphones in lieu of post-its and who stare at themselves in their bathroom mirrors for ages—examining their hair and the weird dark spot on their face that they wish would go away and worrying over how their teeth look. I sit quietly, glancing at the ubiquitous institutional clock placed to the upper right of the classroom door. I have ten minutes. I stand up and introduce myself and make sure everyone here is in the right classroom and explain to them how to fill out their test booklet, which they begin to do. Three boys stand up and form a line for the wall-mount, hand crank pencil sharpener and a girl raises her hand and asks if I have an extra calculator. Two students did not think to bring pencils, which I find mind boggling, and two well-prepared students pass extra pencils to those who need them, both students’ arms stretching, bridging the gap between the rows of desks. When everyone is set I instruct them to fill in the bubbles for practice test 4A, which is the test they are taking.

The clock hands read 3:30 and so I say, “Ok, open your test booklets and good luck. This section will be twenty five minutes,” and on the board I write, “Section 1: 3:30-3:55.” And then I watch them write.

The girls seem petite—lost in the enormous folds of their black hooded sweatshirts. The boys are all dark haired and swarthy, except for one who is blonde and a foot taller than most of his classmates and who writes clumsily with his left hand. I am amazed that I was this age once and that the boys I liked were boys this age—something which now seems as foreign as having a crush on a three year-old. I heard a male stand-up comic tell a joke once about how when he was younger he had a crush on Winnie Cooper from “The Wonder Years,” and how when he watched the show years later as an adult he was hit with the revelation, “Holy shit, she’s a little girl! I had all those dreams about her and she was a little girl!”

The first section of the SAT—the one they are taking on the practice test right now—is the essay question, which will ask them something philosophical and open ended, and to which they (hopefully) will answer using a thesis statement and concrete examples. The question will have a quote—something like:

“That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value.” -Thomas Paine

And following the quote will be a question. Something like, “Do we value only what we struggle for? Plan your response, and then write an essay to explain your views on this issue. Be sure to support your position with specific points and examples.”

And the kids will lean forward, elbows on their desks, hands pulling their mouths askew as they holds up their heads. And I wonder to myself if we value only what we struggle for but it is too much for me to think about at 3:45 on a Thursday so I flip open the New Yorker I have brought with me, turning to the cartoon caption contest on the final page. There is a picture of two men clinging desperately to a ship that is sinking inside a teacup. The contest encourages you to submit your answer at the website but this is an old issue, since I can never read the issues as fast as I get them, and this contest has already been won by someone like, “Alan Fried, Saugertes, NY” or “Diane Harrison, Minneapolis, MN.” One of the men in the drawing has his mouth open and I try to brainstorm what he would be saying—something about the Boston Tea Party or the expression, “Tempest in a Teapot,” but I cannot think of anything good or witty so I close the magazine and lay it in front of me on the desk. I glance at the clock and say, “You have five minutes remaining,” which makes the children sigh loudly and temporarily sit up straighter, furrowing their brows as they write furiously, trying to sum up their ideas. A few have finished and are sitting listlessly at their desks and I want to say, “No, write more! They want you to write more—you will get a better grade if the essay is longer!” But it does not really matter all that much. The advice I give most often after the test is not to dwell on what went wrong. Some of them will be unhappy with their essays and will continue to think about what they could have done differently throughout all the other sections of the test and I encourage them to learn from their mistakes without dwelling on them. Some of them will do incredibly well on this test and still not have any idea what they are doing with their lives and some of them will do nowhere near as well and will be happy and well-adjusted by thirty.

I have hit thirty and am not sure what I want out of life other than to do something well and to someday win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. I am trying as hard as I can, but I would like to be a better SAT tutor and a better person. I would like to live by all the sappy rules on the inspirational posters that ring the classroom but I know that I will go home and beat myself up for something stupid, like not having a job in an office or buying the French Vanilla yogurt when I meant to buy plain or for deciding to cut my own bangs and then immediately regretting it.

I hear a slight tap and every student’s head jerks up from their papers and when I turn the nun is peering through the glass of the door. I make a motion for her to come in. She smiles sheepishly and mouths the words, “I’m sorry,” and after walking quietly toward me whispers the phrase, “My keys.” I open the wide shallow desk drawer and there they are—her keys, sitting in a nest of paperclips. She makes a mock gesture of hitting herself in the forehead with the palm of her hand and takes the keys and mouths the words, “Thank you.” Some of the students wave to her and she waves back. Their heads go back down to their essays and the nun surveys them as they scribble. She turns to me and smiles and says, “Keep up the good work,” and I cannot help grinning, happy to be acknowledged by her. I think to myself, “You too!” but do not say anything. I nod graciously, and with that she grasps her keys in her hand and walks gracefully out of the room.

I am envious of her that she knows exactly what she is doing with her life while I will spend the evening scrolling through the craigslist want ads, but at the same time, “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.” I may struggle for a few additional years, but there is no need to beat myself up about it. I pull a post-it from her drawer and debate what I should write to inspire myself. “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point,” I think, but then decide that no, as true as it might be, it seems like something a nun would write. Grasping my pen lightly I write the words, “Defrost Chicken/Remember Mail Netflix!!!” and smile, plastering it onto the desktop.

Running

2011-07-21T18:36:16Z

My track coach was one of those terrifying people who was always telling you to “run through the pain.” This was the late 90’s, when “No Fear” T-shirts and Nike slogans had taken over and people became fond of sayings like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and “Second Place is the First Loser,” and no one was more fond of these sayings than high school track coaches, who regularly dispensed any wisdom that would keep us running—anything to keep us moving forward.

And I had never been particularly athletic, although the pain inflicted on my body during track practice was nothing compared to the pain of trying out for another sports team—soccer or basketball or lacrosse—and not making it. Or the pain of making it and feeling alone because you were not really friends with any of the girls on those teams. Knowing that no one wanted to pass you the ball because you were awkward and clingy and all your clothes were from Marshalls. But anyone who wanted to be on the track team could be on the track team and the only requirement was that you not stop running.

Looking back, I realize that I was a terrible runner because I was afraid of the gun. I would be crouched in the starting position, one knee bent, the tips of my fingers bearing my weight on the clay-colored polyurethane surface of the track. If you are a good runner or a competitive person, the anticipation of the gunshot should fire you up—there should be an eagerness in your muscles, each of them anxious to fling you forward like a rubber band at the sound of the shot, your body flying around the track like a test tube in a centrifuge. This is never what I felt. Each time I crouched, waiting for the gun and each time the thoughts that ran through my head were, “It’s going to be loud. It’s going to be loud. It’s going to be really loud and where the hell is it? Why the hell haven’t they shot the gun already?” And my heart would begin pounding and immediately I would think something like, “Why am I doing this? Maybe I should join the Drama club,” and suddenly the gun would go off, reverberating through my ears, and I would think, “Shit!” and start running.

When you are actually running is maybe the least stressful part of being at a track meet. You are not quivering, waiting for a gunshot. You are not sitting alone on the bleachers reading a book, wishing you were sitting with the large group of girls on the side lawn who are all talking and sharing water bottles. You are not last-minute studying for a test you are almost positive you will fail, poring over your poorly-taken notes that you have thrown into your bookbag and dragged to the track meet. You are running, which is the only part of track I ever loved. You are running and the people in the bleachers, whoever they are, are all screaming. And most of them are probably not screaming for you, but it doesn’t matter, really. Screaming is screaming and the sound of people screaming energizes you. And your coach, wherever the hell he is, is yelling at each of his runners to run through the pain.

You are running through it as best you can. And you don’t know at the time that the pain is nothing compared to the types of pain you’ll encounter in your future—you have decades ahead of you in which you will be rejected by people you care for and will not be chosen for things that you have set your heart on. You will be lonely at times, which is incredibly painful. Nobody really tells you that—I’m not sure why. You will lose people you love and hurt so badly you will wish you had some sort of physical pain—a severed arm—so that people could see how much you are suffering. The pain of running is nothing compared to those things, but it is pain and you cannot stop running because of it.

My least favorite event in track and field is the 400 meters because it is too long to sprint but too short to be a long distance run. You pound the track for 300 meters, pulling yourself through the ether with everything you have in you until you have nothing left and have an additional 100 meters between you and the finish line. And for that 100 meters it is not so much up to you as it is up to your legs which will either collapse beneath you like coiled rope or will somehow ferry you down the final stretch. And so now, after telling you that that is my least favorite event, I will tell you that the event that I like LESS than the 400 meters is the 600 meters, which is one of the events during winter track.

You join winter track for one of two reasons: either you are a promising track and field star (this in no way applied to me) or you want to play a winter sport and are terrible at basketball. Or maybe, more than your wanting to play a winter sport, you are joining it because you want to do something and you have no idea what you are good at yet. You want to be a part of a group and have no idea what group will take you in. That is another type of pain that you have identified and are running through until you can figure out how to make it go away. You are not really good at anything. You know that you do not want to go home every day after school and sit on your bed reading The World According to Garp over and over again. You cannot join the chess team because you are mediocre at chess. You cannot join the math club because you are horrific at math. All high school clubs seem to have been designed for people who are either brilliant or athletic.

You crouch for the 600 meters, your fingers pushing against the firmer floor of the indoor, winter track. You wait for the gun—the stupid gun that you hate because almost nothing in life begins that abruptly—and you are running. You are pulling yourself forward with the muscles in your legs and you feel a little flicker of something in your hip that you have never felt before. You are running through the pain because that is what your coach has asked of you so at least you can do that. You will never be the fastest or jump the highest or astound anyone with amazing feats of endurance, but the running through the pain thing you can do. It will not prepare you for success, necessarily, but it will prepare you for life.

You feel the flutter again but you are 400 meters through and throwing yourself forward with any remaining energy and that is when suddenly you feel something snap. And I don’t mean that in a figurative way, in that you felt something inside you snap and suddenly you realized your innate self-worth. You feel something inside you snap—something physically snaps-- and suddenly you are filled with the worst pain you have felt in your life. It is not the pain of running, it is the pain of something going horribly, horribly wrong. You note that for some reason you can no longer move your right leg. But everyone is screaming and you are supposed to keep running, so you throw your left leg forward and drag your right leg behind you, repeating this motion several times. Everyone who was not already ahead of you has now lapped you and you are thinking, “Run through the pain, dammit!” So you are tossing out your left leg, dragging your limp right leg as if it were a large animal you had killed and were bringing back to camp. Also, tears are streaming down your face because you have never felt anything this painful. And it is at that point that two seniors run off the sidelines and grab you—and say, “Are you ok? What happened? What are you doing?” They put their necks underneath each of your arms and help to carry you off to the sidelines.

The doctor will tell you later that it is an avulsion fracture—a break that occurs when a fragment of bone tears away from the main mass of bone—in this case in your hip. The bone pulled apart at the tendon, due to a muscular contraction that was stronger that the forces holding the bone together.

There are certain types of pain you should run through and certain types you should not and it will almost always be up to you to decide which is which. You will have to interpret when to stop and when you should keep going. If you are tired, keep running. If part of your bone breaks off, you should usually stop. And if you are going through the most common sort of pain found in high schools—the pain of not really feeling like you belong anywhere—then you should definitely not stop. Keep going at all costs and do not stop moving until you have found a group where you do not seem so completely out of place. Do not sit and rest somewhere where you are fundamentally unhappy and where you have nothing to offer.

After the diagnosis I lay in bed, resting the fracture for a full week and then spent the next few weeks on crutches. The doctor told me there was no way the break would be healed in time for me to join the track team again in the spring. I nodded and thanked him for his advice. That spring, after ascertaining that it did not involve a starting gun, I joined the Drama Club. I remained in the club for the final two years of high school. It was very enjoyable.

I can't emotionally handle waitressing.

2011-06-27T02:25:41Z

The woman walks into the restaurant smiling. I see her only out of the corner of my eye because I am busy getting something for another customer, but I watch as the hostess leads her to a round corner booth, setting down two menus. The woman sits, sliding deep into the booth and stares dreamily out across the restaurant. She is wearing a white jacket that looks like something my mother would find at TJ Maxx and would hold up to me on a hanger, asking, “Isn’t this nice? On sale! Thirty dollars!” She is in her mid sixties, maybe, wearing a modest, mid-length black skirt and black, open toed flats with pantyhose. She has a slight thickness to her ankles and her wrists and her neck—her hands she places on the table, one on top of the other, drumming her fingers across the tops of her opposing fingers. Her hair, which is shoulder-length, has been dyed a deep red, and is dry and frayed at the tips. Under her jacket she is wearing a black top with a small bow on it, from which a loose thread protrudes onto her neckline. She smiles and says,

“There are going to be two of us!” and I nod and say,

“Can I get you something to drink while you wait on the rest of your party?”

This is always what I say to tables that are waiting for people to arrive. And she says,

“May I have a coffee, please?”

She grins while she asks, showing all her teeth. Her eyes get small and squint when she smiles and she reminds me of a good-natured British housekeeper from a movie. And I nod, happily—I am in a good mood because it is Friday—and leave to get her coffee. When I return there are three gifts on the table wrapped, alternatingly, in gold paper with white curling ribbon and white paper with gold curling ribbon. The gold paper has the imprints of stars on it. The gifts are shabbily wrapped or have been tossed around a bit—the corners are pushed in and the paper has wrinkled in places, but she sets the three boxes on the table, one stacked on top of the other, creating a tiered wedding cake of presents. I pour the coffee, setting down the milk. I place a sugar caddy on the table but she waves it off, saying, “No no, it’s fine, I don’t need it,” and I place the caddy back on the tray. I ask her,

“Is tap water all right or would you prefer sparkling or still?”

and the woman, smiling but anxious, waves her hands over the tops of the glasses, saying she doesn’t need any water for now. The coffee is fine. “I’ll wait for him,” she says. “I’ll see what he wants.”

I walk away from her table for a while and she sips her coffee and stares out into space. Sometimes when people are sitting by themselves for a while they will pull our a newspaper or start doing SuDoKu puzzles or will play round after round of Angry Birds on their iPhones, but she does not begin doing any of these things. She will occasionally pick her black patent leather purse, which is the size of a VHS tape, unzippering it and pulling out her cell phone. She opens the phone and then immediately closes it, putting it back in the purse. She continues to sit.

And I am still working so I begin to move around—ordering a lentil salad and an order of mussels for the two Japanese women in my section. A mother comes in with her adult daughter and orders a chopped salad and a chicken club, which are my two least favorite things on the menu. They both order diet cokes. I glance at the woman with the coffee but she is fine—still sitting alone, still staring ahead blankly. A man who comes in twice a week or so comes in and is upset that we are out of salmon and begrudgingly orders pasta. And when I apologize that we don’t have what he wanted initially he suddenly becomes calm and says, “It’s no big deal, don’t worry about it.” Two women sitting in the back order wine and ask about the beet salad appetizer with enthusiasm.

I stand by the computer, punching in orders and out of the corner of my eye notice that the woman who ordered coffee has been joined by a man of about forty. The man has a crew cut and a crisp light blue work shirt and khakis, and is sitting with his legs hanging out of the booth, as if riding side-saddle on a horse. He looks a little bit like a young Steve Jobs and it becomes apparent that the woman is his mother, who, judging by her excitement, does not see him all that frequently. She has fluttered to life like an excited bird, fawning over her son, talking to him with enthusiasm while he calmly fields her questions with a contrived energy. I walk to the table and ask what sort of water they would like and the man asks for a Champagne and says no water—he doesn’t need water. I bring the Champagne back and he continues sitting awkwardly, his legs half out of the booth, with the woman handing him the presents. I ask if they have any questions on the menu and the man turns to me and says, “No food, I’m not going to eat—I have a dinner later.”

I keep an eye on the table and after a few minutes the man calls me over and asks for another champagne and then asks if I can order him an omelet with American cheese and then charge his card right away. And I get him the Champagne and order the omelet. He pays with an American express black card, which means that he has tons and tons of money. Several minutes later he hugs the woman quickly and abruptly leaves the restaurant.

I go back to the table, where the woman is once again sitting alone. The gifts the man was given are unwrapped, piled on the chair. On top is a birthday card that reads, “I can’t believe you’re 40!” with an image of a cartoon man with very long arms putting his hands to his cheeks in disbelief. The woman, re-adjusting to the silence, sits quietly. I ask if everything at the table is ok and she says, “Oh yes, everything is fine.” Her omelet arrives and she eats it slowly, in small polite forkfuls, staring at nothing. Her son’s empty Champagne glass sits opposite her on the table and I pick it up, as if to erase the evidence that this was originally a two-person lunch. When she is done eating she politely pushes her plate to the side and begins re-wrapping the gifts in tissue paper and bubble wrap. There is a book with a polar bear on the front with the words, “Snow Day,” written across it in blue letters. I do not understand why a 40 year old man would want a book like that, but it seems like something the woman would buy, thinking it was cute, possibly for a grandchild. In the store she must have been excited—the polar bear and the glossy paper of the cover and the discount (30% off the regular price!). But now the woman’s hands have become heavy and her thumbs move slowly as they clumsily re-wrap and re-pile the opened presents, which are still sitting beside her. She had counted, I think, on her son taking them—on his saying, “Thank you, mom! This is indispensable! These are so cute! This is exactly what I wanted!” and sitting down with her to a long, chatty lunch. But it did not work that way. He is gone, but she is still here and the things that she tried to give him are still here.

When everything is re-wrapped the woman quietly asks me if we have a bag somewhere that she could use to put the gifts in, since it will be hard to hold them otherwise. I say, “Oh yes, don’t worry, I’ll find a bag for you just hold on one second,” and run downstairs to get something—anything—that will help her. I find a bag used for take-away orders and my hostess finds a large plastic bag somewhere and between the two bags, we are able to fit in all of the gifts. The woman says, “Thank you very much,” and I say anxiously, “I hope everything was ok,” and she smiles and says, “The food was delicious.” She grabs the bags with her son’s gifts and 40th birthday card and picks up her black patent leather pocketbook, holding her head high. She smiles like a news anchor. She smoothes her skirt. And then, just as my heart is breaking, she walks out the door and disappears into the city.

Everything at Bed Bath and Beyond is Stupid

2011-01-18T01:10:17Z

When Aidan Reese Podgarsky-Carlson arrived in the world, weighing 3 lbs. 11oz, I was wandering through a Bed Bath and Beyond, picking up Quiche pans. I was using up the remainder of a gift card by wandering the store, aimlessly picking up vegetable brushes and spatulas and soap dispensers, and when I found the quiche pans, I thought, “Oh, nice. Quiche Pans,” and tucked them into the glass pyrex dish I was already carrying, next to the silicone pot holder and grapefruit spoons. I am holding all these things, vacillating between the idea of getting a cart or a basket of some sort, or just keeping them piled in my arms, awkwardly lugging my items around the store, when I receive a text message from Arthur’s brother saying that Andrea is in labor. The baby is two months premature, but so far it appears to be ok. I smile hugely because I am excited—excited that their baby is coming and that it seems healthy and that its parents have so many milestones ahead of them—I am smiling thinking of how they must be smiling, and turning my head I see a woman staring at me quizzically, because she does not realize that a baby is about to be born somewhere in the world. She does not understand why I am grinning. She has never, she thinks to herself, seen anyone get quite this enthusiastic about silicone bake pans.

Today was January 14th, 2011, and years from now, my friend Arthur and his wife Andrea will look back on today as one of the happiest, most monumental days of their lives. They will re-live it over and over, thinking of today as the day that turned them from a young couple into a small family, and here I am like a giant turd in a coat, waltzing around listlessly during the birth of their son, looking at the prices on non-stick fry pans, cheerfully noticing that my spatula is printed with the conversion table from cups to ounces and going, “That might be really helpful with some of my recipes in the future!”
When I first learned that his wife was in labor my heart picked up a little bit and I went, “Oh boy, it’s really happening,” and immediately thought, “This is exciting! I should do something.” But as exciting as it is, it is not my baby and I am not the doctor delivering the baby, so there is nothing for me to do except to continue to do what I was doing. So I continue walking through the Bed Bath and Beyond, which has suddenly become oppressively mundane.

Arthur, when he is not pacing hallways as an expectant father, is a post-production film editor, and if he were editing this for a movie trailer he would begin with a shot of pandemonium. He would start off with a frantic hospital room, with close ups of his wife panting and screaming and holding her stomach while nurses and doctors run in frantic circles—blurry flashes of seagrass green as their scrubs fly past the camera lens, people yelling things like, “Stat!” and “Give her 9 cc’s!” or “She’s dilated to 25 centimeters!” And right when your conscious mind kicked in and went, “Excuse me? 25 centimeters??” he would immediately cut to a shot of me, walking lazily through the aisles of Bed Bath and Beyond to the hum of repetitive Muzak, casually picking up egg timers shaped like chickens and setting them so that they all go off at the same time. The camera would cut again to a shot of me looking confusedly at a long pipe cleaner-type mechanism whose purpose I was unable to discern (it’s for drying the insides of bottles, I was later told) and then again to a shot of me trying to adhere suction cup-mount bathroom appliances to my forehead, before knocking over a display of toilet brushes and slinking guiltily behind a display of trash cans.

And then suddenly, without warning, you are back with his wife in the hospital, surrounded by noises and beeps and craziness. Back to innumerable people holding clipboards and a woman whose mouth is covered by a doctor’s mask but the camera zooms in on her eyes as she realizes that they cannot slow the pre-labor—that despite the fact that the due date is not for another two months, they can’t keep the fetus in utero. And if you are close enough to her face maybe she says something under her breath, like, “This baby’s coming out today,” And then it zooms to his wife’s face, which is steeled with resolve, and then zooms in on Arthur and Andrea’s hands, which are gripping each other tightly, the veins bulging in their fingers and wrists as they wheel her towards the delivery room. And as the couple is separated momentarily, we watch Arthur’s mouth become a small, thin, determined line—as if he will deliver this baby himself—as if inherent in his mouth is the determination in all his 36 years of life that his baby will live and thrive and succeed. And as they wheel his wife into the delivery room she becomes a silhouette against the blinding, ethereal light that emerges as they open the doors.

And you hear a woman’s angelic voiceover promising that your life is about to change, and you see Arthur’s face thinking, “Yes. This is a defining moment in my existence,” except that the woman keeps talking and specifies that your life is about to change, thanks to the new SodaStream Genesis—the video for which I am skeptically watching in-store while standing near a collection of Brita Water filters. The SodaStream genesis is a device that turns water into sparkling water or, if you add a capful of some sort of syrupy concentrate that is being sold for $4.99 a bottle, into a variety of different sodas. And your heart is still beating rapidly, going, “The baby! What will happen to the baby?” but sorry, no dice, you’re back to the aimlessness-of-one’s-twenties montage as I cynically watch the SodaStream video, which is now showing a shot of a waterfall, announcing that buying this product will keep 2,000 cans and bottles a year out of a landfill, and out loud to nobody in particular, I go, “No it won’t.” The ad cuts to a woman in a hot pink V neck sweater who cannot seem to stop smiling, filling up a bottle with water, installing the Soda Stream cartridge, and (ta da!) turning it into sparkling water with the gentle press of a button. The woman then decides she would like to turn it into a cola drink of some kind, and so she takes a capful of the allotted syrup and pours it into the bottle, in much the same way one would pour detergent into a load of laundry. I make a disgruntled face, imagining what it would be like to drink laundry detergent. I quietly walk away from the display.

The camera cuts again to me (Yes, me. We’re still on me) as I peruse the now-extremely-on-sale Christmas decorations—wreaths and ornaments and things you’re supposed to hang over your doorknob that say “Ho ho ho!” on them. I roll my eyes at most of it, being drawn toward the decorations that make noise, finding one that is playing the song, “Up on the housetop the reindeer pause…out comes good old San-ta Claus! Down through the chimney with lots of toys! All for the little one’s Chris-mas joys!” And immediately after the song ends you hear a woman going AAARRRRGHHHHHH, which, admittedly, is just a stereotype I have from seeing pregnant women in other movies. I have no idea if most women actually go AAAARRRRGGGHHHH when they have babies, or if they do, if Andrea did that. But for now—just for now—we’re going to have her going AAARRRRRGHHHH as she has the baby because it’s such a nice contrast to the Christmas music that was playing directly beforehand. So she goes AAARRRGHHHHHH, and there will be crying, and then an overwrought voice going, “It’s a boy!” even though they knew in advance it was going to be a boy—it’ll be better for the montage if they pretend they just found out.

And then we’ll cut to them a little bit later, when we are positive the baby is ok and is going to make it. Arthur is standing by the side of her bed and she is holding the baby for the first time and they look at each other and smile. And inherent in their smiles is the realization that all three of them will be ok. That they are filled with pride. That it is a long, hard road ahead, but that they are looking forward to it, except for maybe the whole ‘paying for college’ part. And as the camera pulls away from them, the angelic newly-born family, we hear an obnoxiously loud chime go, “Don-DING. Don-DING,” and just as you wonder why the hell none of them are reacting to it it cuts back to me, apologizing to the Bed Bath and Beyond Cashier as I both hand her my coupon for 20% off one item and reach into my pocket to read my text message. And I smile, reading the message that says that Aidan Reese was born and that he weighed 3 lbs. 11oz. and that mother and baby are doing fine, and I go, “Aaaaack! This is exciting!” Because it is exciting. I will go home and put away my quiche pans and my pyrex dish and my vegetable brush and my spatula with the conversion of measurements on it, which is stupid, obviously—none of those things is the least bit important in the grand scheme of the universe. But Arthur will go home, eventually at least, with a tiny genetic experiment—an amalgam of himself and his wife whose tiny hands are balled up into fists. Aidan Reese weighed only 3 lbs. and 11 oz, which, in case you are curious, is 3 lbs and one and one third cup, according to my spatula.

And I will go home and look for baby gifts online and will maybe make some sort of casserole in my pyrex dish and watch documentaries that are streaming through Netflix. And Arthur will go home and never be the same again for the rest of his life.
And the woman says, “That’ll be 44.19,” and I hand her my gift card, and she swipes it and hands it back to me with a long receipt and says, “You have 26.50 left on the card. Have a good day,” and smiling—still smiling, I say, “Thanks.”

Squeaks

2011-01-04T22:21:01Z

I sit with my friend Guy in a shitty vegetarian diner eating disgusting, crustless pie that is so awful I would feel bad feeding it to a cat. We meet once a month or so-- not always in a shitty vegetarian diner-- and never again in THIS shitty vegetarian diner because Jesus Christ, this pie is disgusting-- but we meet once a month to talk about writing and whether or not either of us has been capable of doing it well or at all. Guy is a good writer and a good person. He has a Ph.D in psychology and a british accent. We met each other several years ago at an open mic when we discovered that we were the only two comics that had elaborate filing systems for our jokes-- the only two people who were regularly alphabetizing punchlines and categorizing one-liners by subject matter (This goes under "C" for Cat Vomit). We are the type of people who are impressed by Jamie Lee Curtis because she has a filing system for the homemade soups in her freezer. Or, ok, admittedly we have never talked about this but I think it is very impressive and I know him well enough to know that he would be impressed as well.

We meet with a third friend, a despondent copyeditor who is also a comedian, who is ALSO a vegetarian, hence the disgusting, disgusting pie which I am picking apart with my fork as if it were an owl pellet and I were hunting for a squirrel skeleton that I could glue to a piece of construction paper.

Guy says, "So I finished the screenplay and I reeeally like it."
When he is excited about something he is writing he smiles with all his five billion teeth showing at once and he looks like an eleven year-old who is being given a gift and CANNOT WAIT TO RECEIVE IT. "I really like how it turned out and I'm submitting it to all these contests so...you know," he says, toning down his enthusiasm. "We'll see." He smiles hopefully.

The copyeditor and I both smile because we are excited for him. We are all good writers but Guy is by far the most prolific, turning out endless sheaves of pages. I first got to know him after reading his screenplay which, after the first two pages I stopped reading because I thought it was going to be about baseball and I am usually bored by baseball-themed screenplays. And he politely let me know that no, the script had nothing at all to do with baseball-- that was just the first scene that took place on a baseball diamond. And so I said, "I'm sorry-- I'm a horrific douche bag with the attention span of a flea," which is mainly true, and I read the rest of his screenplay, which was wonderful.

We meet again, a month or so later, at a brunch place in Chelsea. Our copyeditor friend picks the restaurants because she is the only one who is decent at that sort of thing-- I am there to talk about our writing and our lives and would often be content to eat bread crusts from an East Village trash can as long as the conversation is good. Guy has begun another project-- another screenplay-- a Pixar-type film about the secret lives of clothing, which I think is very good. He and my friend ask what I am doing and I am doing, as usual, nothing fast. I am writing essays about my dad farting or my dog taking a nap and in the time it takes to write one of those essays, Guy has written three more dissertation-length pieces.

The next time we see him he has written a young adult novel and the time after that he has written a similar novel, but this time for regular adults who are not young. And he writes well, in the same way he is funny. He is a talented person, but wonderful things do not always happen to talented people. And he is persistent, but wonderful things do not always happen to talented people even if they are persistent. The world can be an unforgiving, shitty place, filled with mediocre, crustless, vegan-friendly pie. The three of us have been googling ourselves for years with very few encouraging changes. My goal, which I have only recently achieved, was to google my last name and no longer be outranked by an obscure Austrailian Law firm. Guy's goal was to be able to google the phrase "Guy Winch" without coming up with information on sailboat winches, specifically the guy winch (which is, unfortunately for him, an actual type of winch).

We are living our lives and stockpiling our rejections.

"I have so many rejection letters," he says, "I've rented storage space for them."

But we are trying so, so hard. Guy, the copyeditor and I meet at a bagel place on the lower east side. The copyeditor is bemoaning her job, which has become unbearable. She is writing furiously. Guy is working on another screenplay but is stuck and mentions that he has an idea for another book and is considering abandoning the screenplay altogether. This other book is about complaining.

"Not about venting," he stresses. "Complaining."

"Venting is what we've been doing for the last forty minutes," I say.

"I'm venting about my stupid awful job," the copyeditor says.

"Yes," he says, "But I don't want to talk about venting, I want to talk about complaining. The problem with complaining," he says quietly, "is that no one listens and so nothing gets done." He sits for a moment in silence, thinking. "Nothing ever gets done," he says again, as if he is just fully realizing it. "People complain about things for hours, but the whole point of complaining is to have someone listen so that things will change. No one is listening because people who complain are so...they're so..."

"Mean," says our copyeditor friend. "Obnoxious. Horrible."

"Complainy," I offer.

"We'll go with 'mean,'" he says politely. "But yes. Also complainy."

He sits back in his chair.

"I'd love to write a book," he says, "on how to complain."

And it is not a screenplay about clothing or a young adult novel or anything similar to what he has written before, but because he is a good writer and we think he will do a good job we say, "That is a wonderful idea." And it is. We have been meeting for years now, writing endless lines of text. And we vent, but we do not complain. We vent that we are tired and frustrated and that we think a piece of writing is very good but we sent it to a publication and they said, no, we were mistaken, it was not good, it was a piece of shit. Or, "it was very nice but they don't have room for it," which is much friendlier but feels almost the same. We vent that we are working hard but that the world is too big and too unforgiving. And then we admit that ok, maybe we could have worked a little harder and typed sentences more creative than, "the world is too big and too unforgiving," because give me a break, right? Sheesh.

We will keep writing, because if airing our woes to friends counts as venting, then to keep writing and keep submitting our writing is complaining-- it is taking action. We are politely tugging on the pant leg of the world and asking if we can say a few words for posterity. And when the world says, "No, other people are talking right now," we pull out another piece of writing and say, "What about this? Can I say this?"

"The complaining book sounds good," we tell him. "Go home and write it." And we left the restaurant with our respective dreams and went home to our respective keyboards.
And we sit and write and we do not complain about having to write. Complaining is very useful sometimes, as when you are in a restaurant and you are served a piece of pie that looks like it is make of sheep brains and bat vomit-- you have to know not to yell at your waiter and go, "You stupid piece of shit! This is disgusting!" You have to know that if your spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend puts too much medicated powder in his or her sock to combat his or her athlete's foot, you shouldn't go, "Are you a fucking idiot, tracking powder all over the house! It looks like ghosts have been tap dancing through the fucking apartment!"

Complaining is about patiently chugging away to get whatever it is you really want. It is about learning how to politely tell a waiter that this pie was "not so great," without using the words "cat mucus" or "gag reflex." It is funnier to use those words, but not as effective. And if you are lucky, the waiter will say, "I'm really sorry, let me see if we have something else that might be better," and your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend will say "I didn't realize the medicated foot powder made such a mess. I'm so sorry you had to clean it up. I'll make sure I never do it again."
And if you tug on the pant leg of the world enough times, eventually, if you are tugging politely enough, the world will say, "I'm sorry I kept you waiting in obscurity for so long. If there is something you would like to say, please go ahead. We are all listening."

The Squeaky Wheel
http://www.amazon.com/Squeaky-Wheel-Complaining-Relationships-Self-Esteem/dp/0802717985

www.guywinch.com

At the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival

2010-10-25T00:10:17Z

We crowd into the Robert Treat Tri-State Ballroom. It is filled with chairs—enough to accommodate the wedding of a minor celebrity or reasonably affluent prince—but it is not a wedding, it is a poetry festival in Newark, so the room is filled with women in their forties and fifties with graying, practical haircuts and floral neck scarves. A few have long hair—brown or yellow or red with streaks of gray. The ones with long hair keep it clipped back with tortoiseshell barrettes or combs—the barrettes glossy against their hair, which is dry like piles of leaves—there is no time for deep conditioning treatments when one is trying to grade undergraduate creative writing papers, which is what I assume all of them are usually busy doing. They wear artsy glasses and comfortable footwear and I take the liberty of assuming that many of them have sea glass or turquoise jewelry at home. I am fairly certain that least three fourths of them like cats and at least half buy organic milk. They are all calm and thoughtful and busy pointing to groups of available seats, saying things like, “Look, Miriam. Ask if they’re saving any of those chairs.”
They peruse the seating arrangements, their Dodge Poetry pamphlets and chapbooks tucked into their complimentary NPR tote bags that they received in exchange for their generous contributions to public radio. Many of these women are married to men with confused-looking blazers and uneven corduroy pants, shirttails untucked and dangling over their embossed leather belts that they bought while vacationing with their wives in Uruguay. The men have gray or white hair, sometimes tied back in unfortunate ponytails, and sit beside their wives, both halves of the couple jotting ideas into little notebooks.

I am young, wearing eyeliner and my jeans from Banana Republic and my hair still brown and shiny and blown dry this morning, but you can see that it is only a matter of time. I am wearing a cute shirt from a trendy store in a mall, but the cardigan I have chosen to wear over this shirt would not look out of place on an eighteenth century widow in an oil painting. I am not wearing a flowing floral skirt purchased from artisan weavers in Panama, but if you look more closely at my jeans you will notice that they are almost four years old and rather than buying a new pair of jeans in whatever style is currently fashionable, I have chosen to mend the inevitable threadbare patches in the crotch area by sewing fresh patches of denim into the inside of the pants with blue thread. I am only a few steps away from wanting to build my own house in the middle of the forest, living simply with my composting toilet and my Annie Dillard novel. I am not yet one of these women, but part of me, the part that has always admired the clothing in Eileen Fischer catalogs, wishes I were. I am seven, maybe eight years from donating money to either NPR or the Helena Rubenstein foundation. I am beginning to like cats.

This particular talk we have come to hear is called “The Riches of Daily Life,” and the speakers are Rachel Hadas, Sharon Olds, Marie Ponsot and a gentleman named Jerry Williams who, from a distance reminds me of Jeffrey Jones, the actor who played the Principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who was later arrested for possession of child pornography.
The three women on the panel mirror their audience in appearance and temperament. They are impossibly quaint, speaking (I assume) about the riches of daily life and how they utilize these riches in their poetry, but I am not listening for the first few minutes of the lecture because I have opened a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and am eating them in a manner befitting a five year-old. I have proceeded to stick my tongue through the middle of each cup, pushing out the center, which is the softest part, and leaving me with the hard chocolate peanutbutter-less ring of the outside. I hold two of these up to my eyes like opera glasses but immediately realize this is immature and quickly eat them. And when I say, of course, “I immediately realize this is immature,” I realize that the whole business of eating them like this is immature—not just the holding them up to my eyes part.

Rachel Hadas has a gray, shoulder length bob and, I am almost certain, a predilection for herbal teas, and she reads a few poems by other poets and a few that she herself has written. They are ok. This is the part where I am not paying attention maybe as much as I should be, so I don’t know what it is that she reads exactly. She is saying something about how the world gives us so much to work with—how everyday experience is littered with blessings and I am looking at my hands which are covered in chocolate and thinking what an idiot I am that I did not think to ask for napkins. I begin licking the chocolate off each of my fingers, much to the dismay of the people sitting behind us who came to see poetry but are instead subjected to a girl licking chocolate off her hands like Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I get most of the chocolate off my fingers and then wipe my hands on the very bottom of my jeans, promising myself that I will wash them when I get home.

Sharon Olds reads next and when you first glance at her she seems old because her hair is long and completely gray, and because she has a cane and because the word “Old” is right there in her last name, but I listen to her speak and read the poems she has selected and she seems, more than anything else, like an enormous little girl who has been turned old through some sort of spell. Her voice is constantly filled with wonder, which is probably why they asked her to do this particular reading—The Riches of Daily Life—as she comes across as someone who still marvels at butterflies and little green worms and if you went up to her and said, “Hey, did you know the word gullible’s not in the dictionary?” she’d say, “It’s not?” with genuine surprise. If Sharon Olds had seen me staring at her through my Reese’s Peanut butter cup eyeglasses she would have thought it was endearing—she would have gone, “Oh neat, look at that!” which appears to be her reaction to everything she has ever encountered in the world.

Marie Ponsot, the third reader, is ninety-one years old and before the reading begins she says into her mic, “It’s too bright. Can we turn the lights down, do you think? Does anyone have a hat?” And several balding men in their sixties lift the caps from their heads and shake them, going, “Here, we have hats!” and Marie Ponsot goes, “Oh, just any hat to shade my eyes from the lights,” and one gentleman tosses his hat up on stage and she puts it on and smiles. That is probably one of the riches of daily life, I think to myself. When you are a ninety one year-old woman and your eyes have been worn out by time and cataracts and almost a hundred years of trying to read the fine print on whatever the hell it is the IRS is mailing you, it must be nice to say, “Does anyone have a hat?” and have all the men excitedly wave their caps as if you are the prettiest girl in the room. Marie Ponsot reads a poem about herself as a young girl, running around in her Sunday clothes which, she stresses, was considered highly inappropriate at the time. Girls in that era did not run. The poem ends with the line, “This is the day the lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it,” and Marie Ponsot smiles defiantly and for whatever reason I get a little teary-eyed. I remember that line being read aloud in church when I was a child but had never taken it to heart, as something they were actually telling me I should do. It was something that I remember hearing over and over, read aloud in a dull, lifeless voice like the words, “Amen,” and “The lord is my Shepard, I shall not want,” which always made me think, “I shall not want what? What is it I’m not supposed to want?” It was read in the same voice which, prior to coming to this festival, was the one which came to mind when reading poetry.

“This is the day the lord has made,” she says. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it." She emphasizes the word "glad," when she reads. Not effusive or perfectly contented or maniacally happy.
"Glad," she says. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

“Ok,” I say. “I will try my best.”

After Marie Ponsot the Jeffrey Jones doppleganger reads. I am jolted to attention during this reading— not by his poetry, but by the fact that he is on this panel at all, as he reads his poems like a disillusioned seventeen year-old skateboarder. He is full of irony and skepticism and self-loathing, while the women look on politely, smiling and full of encouragement. He is like a forty-something year-old version of every ennui-filled twenty-something on the L train to Williamsburg, sitting on a panel with three good-natured grandmothers. He is like Keanu Reeve’s character from “Parenthood” who has somehow wound up on the set of Little Women.

“I have no idea why they put me on this panel,” the Jeffrey Jones poet says out loud, to the audience. “Not that I don’t want to be up here, but really—I have no idea what they were thinking.” He looks to the other women and Sharon Olds smiles at him lovingly, the way she smiles at everyone.

I both like and dislike the Jeffrey Jones poet. I like him because he is funny and thoughtful but I dislike him because he too self-effacing, hoping his cynicism will mask his insecurity. I tend to like and dislike people for the same reasons I like and dislike myself.

He reads a touching poem about his family but reads it with the voice of a sixteen year-old who is trying to distance himself from his consistently embarrassing mother. He is a teenager, both in awe of and mortified by his three loving mothers who are sitting with him on the stage, watching him at his first big reading, wanting both to impress them and to somehow be better than they are—much better. And he finishes the poem and says something along the lines of, “Well yeah—that’s it,” and the women look on, encouraging, and tell him it was very good. He looks down at his feet, unsure of how to think of himself and I look down at my own feet, focusing intently on the worn leather of my boots. I do not want to be an old woman covered in doilies someday, but I do not want to be a teenager forever either. I do not want to have long gray hair and loose fitting sweaters but I do, actually. I want to have that and be ok with it—to like it, even—but I am not there yet. I am still blow drying my hair and buying cute tops from stores in the mall and making fun of people who wear orthopedic shoes, even though I myself both receive and excitedly look through the FootSmart catalog when it mysteriously arrives at my house.

Someone in the audience asks a question about what sort of riches of everyday life move the poets and Rachel Haddas says that only two days ago at the college where she is a professor she came across a small yellow bird that had died by flying into a plate glass window. “It was so yellow,” she says, “that at first I thought it was a post it note. And then I got closer and I could tell it wasn’t a post it note but I thought maybe it was a banana or a banana peel.” She pauses and you can see her becoming a little sad, the way all of the women must get when then encounter tiny dead birds on the sidewalks of their towns. “It was perfectly intact,” she said. “Just lying on the sidewalk. And I felt like I should report it to someone, so I picked it up and brought it in to the library. And I showed it to the librarian on duty, who said, ‘Yes, that sometimes happens.’”

The reading ends shortly after that, and that evening, as we walk through Newark on our way back to the PATH station I notice a small gray bird lying perfectly intact on the sidewalk. It is tiny—only the size of a sparrow, and I want to pick it up the way Rachel Haddas picked up her dead bird, but I have eighteen years of my mother running through my head, going, “Never touch a dead bird. You don’t know what it died of.” And by the time I realize that wait a minute, I do so know what it died of, it died of flying into the plate glass windows of the skyscraper that is directly in front of me—I have already begun thinking, “Well, don’t pick up a dead bird anyway because it’s gross.” And then I think, “What the hell would I do with it anyway? Carry it onto the PATH train? Take it home?” I leave the bird silent and unmoving on the sidewalk but think about it the entire ride home.

The next day we arrive at the festival early for a reading on Women’s viewpoints in poetry. It is, for the most part, the same panelists, except that the Jeffrey Jones look alike has been replaced by a woman in a trench coat who looks a great deal like Diane Keaton, and Marie Ponsot has not yet shown up. Her chair sits empty on the right hand side of the stage. Rachel Haddas sits to the left in a neon green shirt with a pink dragonfly on it and Sharon Olds sits beside her in a flowing black skirt and black sleeveless blouse—exactly the same outfit she was wearing yesterday. The woman who looks like Diane Keaton is wearing rimless eyeglasses and has brown hair with bangs and is dressed the same way I would imagine Diane Keaton would be dressed had she been invited to speak at a poetry festival, exuding a frumpy elegance.

The man in charge of the festival walks out and says that Marie Ponsot has been detained for some reason but that we should begin without her. And Rachel Haddas begins to speak but all I can think about now is Marie Ponsot’s empty chair and what it is that’s detained her. She is, after all, ninety-one years old. Just as I am resigning myself to the fact that I will someday grow old, owning unflattering sweaters and no longer remembering to shave my legs on a regular basis, Marie Ponsot is resigning herself to the fact that she will not be around for much longer. To be ninety-one is to realize that in the not-so-distant future you will be pushing up daisies and your relatives will look down at your gravestone, crying over the loss, and you will not be around to explain to them that, “Yes, this sometimes happens.”

Sharon Olds reads next and everything she reads is wonderful. I once listened to hear read something called “Ode to a Composting Toilet” and fell in love with it and with her to the point that I wanted her to be either my mother or my best friend or my congressional representative. Today she is reading her poem about being a woman—one of the thirty thousand that she has written on this topic—and Marie Ponsot walks out suddenly, with an enormous grin, as if she is someone finishing a marathon. She walks out onto the stage wearing white orthopedic shoes and black velour pants and a black shirt with some green writing across the front. She apologizes that she is late but says that she slept in, and no one is angry that she is late. You can’t be angry that a 91 year-old woman is late to anything. Anyone who routinely gets angry at 91 year-old women should probably be thrown off a building. Of course this is just my personal opinion.

Marie Ponsot sits down and tells us that bodies are metaphors and begins reading a poem about modeling nude in her youth. I want to remember the poem to write some lines of it here but I neglected to write it down at the time so just now I tried to find it by googling the phrase, “Marie Ponsot posing nude” but wound up with little more than an awkward mental picture and an uncomfortable-looking search history on my computer. I do not know what sort of a metaphor my body is currently but it is probably something young and invigorating and exciting in the process of realizing that it will not be young or invigorating or exciting for much longer. My body is a little bird that will someday fly into a plate glass window. My body is a tree where only one leaf has turned yellow. If when you are young your body is a beautiful beach with palm trees and crystal blue water, my body is that place next to the beach with the showerheads for getting sand off your feet—the place where someone’s mother is holding a cooler and has two beach umbrellas worn over her back like quivers of arrows and she is going, “Wash all of it off, please. Nobody track sand into the car.”

We leave the festival and lie on the grass outside the NJPAC center in Newark in the bright sunlight. Jon squints at my face and then says to me, “You have a hair.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” he says, taking my hand and placing it on the underside of my own chin. “Do you feel it?”

“I feel it,” I said. “I’ll pull it out.”

“You won’t be able to,” he says. I try regardless and he leans in, squinting at my neck.

“You curled it,” he says.

“Can you get it for me?” I ask and he sighs softly because he gets uncomfortable when asked to pull hairs out of somebody’s neck in broad daylight at a performing arts center in Newark, whereas I am unaffected by these actions. He reaches over gently, grasping the hair between his fingernails. It comes out on the third try and he places it in my palm.

“It looks like a cockroach leg,” he says.

“Gross,” I say, while noting that this description is accurate. "It's so long. It does look like a cockroach leg."

“I even debated whether or not I should say that,” he says. “I thought, ‘It looks like a cockroach leg’ and then I thought, ‘I wonder if I should say that out loud?’”

“I’m glad you told me,” I say.

“Ok,” he says. "Good."

I hold the hair in my hand before letting the wind blow it somewhere into the lawn, mingling with the inevitable discarded hairs of poets and security guards and women in their early fifties who support arts education. Jonathan and I walk hand in hand through Newark. He is smiling and talking about the festival, making elaborate gestures with his hands. His hair is dark dark brown with a little bit of gray in it. In twenty years maybe it will be all gray, and he will have more wrinkles around his eyes and wear ill fitting plaid blazers and pleated pants. In twenty years he will have circulation-enhancing socks and a neoprene eyeglass strap, but that is fine. I am ok with all of that, or I will be by the time we get there. But that is a long way away and right now it is a beautiful Sunday in Newark and we are walking hand in hand to the train station and the grass of the NJPAC center is a brilliant, surreal green. There are crowds of sparrows sitting in the holes of a chain link fence and a butterfly circles above the highway. As we walk I take a second pack of peanut butter cups and open them, taking one and pushing my tongue through the middle, forming a perfect hole. I hold it up to my eye, glancing through it at my surroundings.

“This is the day the lord has made,” I think, as I realize the chocolate is touching my skin and slowly melting onto my forehead. I look at Jonathan and then at the clouds and then at the garbage along the highway. I peer through my slowly-melting eyepiece at the horizon and the tiny dead birds on the sidewalk. I look at the people walking in and out of the train station and the sad-looking woman on the bench by Dunkin Donuts and at my own hands, young and energetic, with chocolate smeared along the fingertips. I look at the arriving and departing trains and the schedules and track numbers frantically posted and I watch a man eating popcorn.

“This is the day the lord has made,” I think. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

Honeymoon

2010-09-14T17:04:24Z

So the best thing about the Galapagos islands is swimming with baby sea lions. You were going to ask at some point, so there—that’s it, I’ve told you. The best part is having them swim up to your snorkeling mask, twitching their whiskers, having them bring you a piece of kelp the way a puppy would bring you a Frisbee or a stick it wants you to throw, turning around to find that they are playfully biting your flippers. It is hard, when writing a paragraph about baby sea lions, to not use the adjective “playful” seventeen times in a sentence. You chase them playfully and they playfully loop underneath you, slicing through the water like missiles or bullets, playfully circling your awkwardly wet-suited body, playful and curious and eager for the chance to explore (playfully) something that is not another baby sea lion. And they climb clumsily onto the land and look at you, their head tilted. And you see how incredibly small they are and you are touched that something so foreign and innocent is interested in knowing or befriending you. You are in a rocky cove a thousand miles off the mainland in water that is as blue as the Windex bottle that is back home under your kitchen sink. There are jagged grey rocks protruding like the masts of ships and sea turtles circling endlessly, like men lost and unwilling to ask for directions. Hundreds of fish swim back and forth, going about their business and black tip sharks glide past, not caring about you at all even though you see them and immediately think, “Shark!” and freeze and start shaking and begin thinking about all of the ways you could die out here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Bizarrely designed sea urchins litter the floor and you are floating amongst all of it, confused, realizing how fully you do not belong here, when a three month-old sea lion nuzzles up to your mask, so desperate to play that you forget about the sharks and the cold and the enormity of the ocean and begin chasing it as if you are delirious first graders at recess.

Your honeymoon is when things start. You are with a person you love very dearly—someone you may have met at a party or online or through friends, but who you liked enough to take home to your family and say, “Thank you all very much for raising me to adulthood, but I am going to go off and live the rest of my life with this person I just met a few months ago in a bar on 2nd Avenue.” And your family goes, “Sure, that’s fine,” as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, which by the way, it is. And you plan a wedding with cake and flowers and you hire a photographer who promises not to let your face get shiny and a DJ who swears that she will not play the electric slide or the chicken dance. And the wedding happens over the course of a few hours and everyone goes, “Wow, that was wonderful, we had a great time!” And then they go home and immediately go back to their normal lives and you look directly into the face of the person you have married and go, “Ok, so what now?”

The beginning of a relationship is plagued by questions like, “Why didn’t he call me?” and “Is she bipolar or is it normal for women to act like this?” and “Should I say I love you or wait for him to say it?” And the second part of the relationship is when you realize you will spend the rest of your life with this person, whether or not either of you has verbalized this. And once you have verbalized this; once you have said this out loud to them, you begin planning some sort of wedding. And once the wedding is over, that’s it. You look at the person you have decided to spend your life with and think, “Ok, so now we’re in this together.” Your getting married does not change anything about the nature of life or the concept of time, or the universe in general—the minute you are born you begin to die, but now, at least, you have company.

When most people think “romantic setting” they do not call to mind a volcanic plain covered in lizards, where a ten year-old in a life jacket repeatedly asks you to play cards. But that is their own problem, highlighting their inability to think outside the box. While the term “honeymoon” brings to mind images of twin beach chairs and poolside martini delivery service and private romantic bungalows with king-size beds, ours was spent in the matchbox-sized cabin of a boat that, when moving, recreated the feeling of trying to sleep while inside a clothes dryer. While we had intermittent periods in which we could lovingly gaze into each other’s eyes, we could also gaze into the eyes of an NYU Psychology professor and his boyfriend of ten years, an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach, two Ukranian physicists, two German biologists, and an Ecuadorian naturalist guide named, fittingly, Darwin.

The Galapagos islands are on a volcanic conveyor belt in the Pacific ocean, over a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador. The islands are created by volcanic activity and spend millions of years traveling southeast. They inch slowly away from their point of creation, as if on an assembly line, becoming green and lush and developing diversified life forms—plants and bees and finches—bazillions of finches—will someone in design please put the finishing touches on the finches?—before reaching the end point and disappearing back into the ocean, being swallowed, I assume, by some sort of underwater trench. I felt bad for the elderly islands, so close to death, to being sucked under the water and destroyed in the bowels of the earth until I realized that the same thing will more or less happen to me some day, and I was forced to take my mind off my own demise by eating seventeen of the imitation Werther’s Original-like candies that sat untouched in the dining room.

The best thing about the Galapagos is the swimming with baby sea lions, but there are about a thousand million things all competing for second place. On our first day we take a short hike in which a yellow land iguana walks up to our group—walks right up to our shoes—and what you think first is, “It’s a fake iguana. Nothing in the wild would walk right up to us. It seems like an animatronic land iguana engineered by the people at Disney and it is going to say, “Hello!” and start talking to us about its lifespan and eating habits and hypothesize about how its species might have ended up in the Galapagos.” But it is a real iguana and it is, for whatever reason, curious. This is the only iguana on the trip that will do this. The rest of them will lie, indifferent, sunning themselves as you walk past, often with their legs splayed as if they had been dropped from a helicopter.

The iguanas are prehistorically beautiful and freakish. We see land iguanas and marine iguanas and one day after snorkeling we notice that a tortoise the size of a roll top desk is slowly wandering through our belongings on the beach, gazing at a pair of New Balance Sneakers that are sitting on the sand behind a pile of towels. Those are what you think of when you think of the Galapagos islands—the tortoises. They were hunted nearly to extinction by explorers in every century except the present one, which is not difficult to understand, given that their speed is only slightly slower than that of a nursing home resident walking waist deep through molasses. The turtle eyes the sneakers—perhaps imagining some updated version of the Tortoise and the Hare in which he has several corporate sponsors, his shell littered with Nike swooshes and Gatorade logos—and walks off into the brush. The NYU professor begins madly snapping pictures of its rear end as it wanders into the grass. That is something all of us do. We take rapid fire pictures of anything and everything. “There’s a flightless cormorant! A shark! There’s another shark! Penguins! Baby Marine iguanas!” The animals not being afraid, there is no real need for a zoom lens, as you can squat inches from anything living on the island and it will stare blankly at you for upward of thirty minutes while you snap two hundred pictures of it from various angles.

As much as you love the excursions you learn to love the boat that has temporarily become your home. This is not your real home—the post-honeymoon home to which you will return with 3 CDs full of photographs and restlessness and the vague desire to get a puppy. But for now, during your honeymoon, this is your home and your family. You are a newly married couple and if people ask, “Do you have kids?” you violently shake your head no, but if they ask, “Do you have two Ukranian Physicists, two German biologists, and an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach?” you smile with pride and say, “Yes. Yes we do.” You talk for hours with the Psychology professor from NYU and his boyfriend, the only people who live close enough that you might have kept in touch after returning from the trip, except that they are (go figure) moving to Abu Dhabi seven days after arriving back in New York. You play cards with the family from Redondo Beach as their youngest daughter (who is five) regales you with tales of things her mother has said she is allowed to do, using the word “actually” twice in every sentence and tugging at your pants when she feels you have stopped listening. She is tiny—just tall enough to reach the lightswitches, and has bangs cut straight across her forehead and is always laughing and smiling and running around the deck and talking in long, surprisingly complex sentences, occasionally using the words “endemic” and “ecosystem.” Her sisters are ten and fifteen. The eldest is in the midst of being a teenager, lovable but despondent and hopeful for attention, and the ten year-old is trapped in the inbetween. She is too old to be blissfully innocent—strangers do not talk to her without reserve in supermarkets anymore—but she is not old enough to know why her older sister is frustrated and upset. She is trapped in limbo between the joy of believing in Santa and the agony of hating your mother and her stupid goddamn haircut and why the hell can’t I stay out till ten thirty if everybody else is staying out till ten thirty? And there is always Darwin who stands at the head of the table, shyly answering questions, quietly explaining how they are trying to save the Galapagos ecosystem. He is always thoughtful and serious except that one time, when I am snorkeling far from the shore I come up to rest for a moment and see him alone on the beach, running back and forth, doing Scott Hamilton-style backflips.

The third day on one of the islands we are playing with baby sea lions. They walk after you manically on the beach as if you had dropped your wallet and they are desperately trying to return it to you. They are fat and happy and, there’s that word again, playful, except for one which is thin and tired and Darwin tells us that if the mother of any of the babies is killed, the baby will also die. He looks at the sea lion solemnly. Its head is cradled in the sand and it is curled, lying anxiously on its side, its ribs showing through its skin. This is one of the last days this particular sea lion will be alive, and the five year-old has particular trouble with this, as do I, as we do not normally live in a world in which it is ok for adorable baby animals to die. We tentatively leave the beach to resume the rest of our vacation but the three girls fall silent and even the Ukranians and the Germans peer over their shoulder at the baby sea lion, as if to say I’m sorry or pay their last respects. A few days later we come to an island where there is the carcass of a baby sea lion curled on the beach and it is sad, but not as sad as seeing a live one approach various mothers, needling them for attention the way the five year-old on our boat comes up to me, hoping that I will run around the deck with her. It is hard to watch the constant rejections from various sea lion mothers, one dismissal after another until the baby resigns itself to lying curled in the sand, waiting, possibly forever.

It is not that we don’t know about death. We come across the enormous skeleton of a Minke whale, the bones bleached white, and the five year old strikes a Vanna White pose in front of it, “Ta Da!!” gesturing to it as if it were something you could win. “This 2005 premium condition Minke whale skeleton, valued at 25,000 dollars!”
We know that things will die and we know that new things will be born. We visit an island heavily populated by blue-footed boobies and see, within the first five minutes of arriving, a mating dance, an expectant couple, the male switching and taking his turn on the nest, and a third pair with a hatchling in the process of crawling from the egg. It is like watching a living textbook—this is how baby birds are made. We look back and see the male booby still lifting his feet and extending his legs, hoping that the female will find this irresistibly attractive and want to “come up for a cup of coffee.” The psychology professor takes hundreds of pictures and promises to give me copies of them, as I have forgotten my camera on that particular excursion. His boyfriend takes photos of Jonathan and I standing by the cliff, the horizon stretched out behind us and says, “These pictures are really sweet.” And I ask, “Sweet like, endearing? Or sweet like, “that’s a sweet car,” and he laughs and says, “Sweet like endearing.” I kiss Jonathan on the top of his arm, in the place where people sometimes have vaccination scars.

We walk through the rest of the island talking with the psychology professor and his boyfriend, with whom we have a great deal in common. That part was unexpected. You arrive at the boat and look at the people you will be spending your time with and wonder what on earth you will talk about with a Ukranian couple in their early fifties who were physicists working during the cold war since you are a waitress at a French restaurant near the World Trade Center. But you remember, suddenly, that people do not happen upon the Galapagos the way you happen upon the world’s biggest ball of yarn while driving cross country—to come here is a deliberate move and anyone who is here wanted to come here very much. We hike together and return to the boat, all of us poring over pictures of fish we think we have identified. We crowd around Darwin and ask about the mating habits of different species and why turtle eggs will be female if the temperature is above or below a certain point and we look at each other and go, “Aha, that’s why!” and we are all genuinely excited. I realize at one point that I am able to identify all four types of Galapagos mangroves and am dismayed that this knowledge will in no way help me become a better waitress, comedian or SAT tutor. But we all know them. Black, white, red and button mangrove. The psychology professor points over the side of the boat and yells, “Puffer fish!” and all of us scramble to see them. His boyfriend stands at the front of the boat looking for whales and I stand with him and he and I several times scream out, “Whale! No…wait. Not a whale. Wave. It was a wave. Sorry. I’m an idiot.” And we finally do see a whale—its endlessly arched back topped with a diminutive dorsal fin—“Whale! Really a whale this time!”—and the German couple pull out a zoom lens for their camera the size of a roll of cookie dough. Everyone is giddy. We are like an excited first grade class.

So the best part is swimming with baby sea lions and the scariest part, aside from maybe the sharks, is leaving and realizing that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you are not entirely sure what you are doing with it yet. We spend the last night on the deck looking at a pelican perched on the boat, while the Ukranian and German couples try to locate the southern cross amongst the stars. We exchange e-mail addresses and the girls beg me to recite the Animaniacs song that lists all the presidents of the United States, but I refuse because I have already done it once that day—I explain to them that the other adults will kill me because having to hear that song more than once is annoying. The fifteen year-old says that she will try to facebook us and the Germans nod politely and smile at everyone and the Ukranians give a long, enthusiastic speech about how wonderful of a time they have had and how happy they are and how this has been maybe the most amazing trip of their lives. Darwin thanks us and says sheepishly that he will miss us, that we have been one of his favorite groups. And the next day at the airport we huge everyone goodbye—the Ukranians grabbing us up in enormous bear hugs and grinning and all of the girls saying goodbye and then last of all we are forced to leave the Psychology professor and his boyfriend who were our favorites, and as we hug them the phrase, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” runs through my head, and the psychology professor hangs his head and says, “I hate saying goodbyes. I’ve always been bad at goodbyes.”

And I silently say goodbye to the islands and to Darwin and to all the animals that I stepped over or walked past. I walk onto the plane with Jonathan, who I do not have to say goodbye to. He is the person who I met online who I took home to my family and said, “Thanks so much for raising me and everything, but I met this person on the internet and I’m thinking about living with him for the rest of my life.” I hold onto his hand. I will have to say goodbye to Jonathan someday, eventually, but hopefully not for a long time—four or five decades at least, if I am lucky. Eventually he and I will go the way of the motherless baby sea lions or the Minke whale, but there is a lot that happens between now and then, so there is no point dwelling on it.

We sit side by side on the plane, Jonathan and I, smiling at each other. The only souvenirs, aside from the photos we have taken, are two green T-shirts that say, “Parque Nacional Galapagos.” Jonathan asks the woman if they are pre-shrunk and she assures us that yes, they are. We head home, delirious, from our honeymoon. And nineteen thousand people ask us what our favorite part of the trip was. And both of us immediately reply, “Swimming with baby sea lions.” Which is true. The swimming with baby sea lions was the best part because first off, baby sea lions are adorable and have huge awkward flippers and enormous eyes. But also because they are mammals and, aside from the Ukranian Physicists and adorable five year-olds from Redondo Beach, they are the things in the Galapagos to whom I am most closely related. You cannot identify with a shark or an albatross, but it is easy to project your own feelings onto the sea lions—that they are happy, sad, thoughtful, lonely or curious.

We arrive home. Jonathan wears his Galapagos shirt the next week and a man on the subway enthusiastically strikes up a conversation with him. It is exciting, talking to other people who have been there. Who will say, “Yes! I know! Red, White, Black and Button mangroves!” And Jonathan washes his shirt and go figure, it shrinks, and he is notably upset. And I decide to surprise him by finding the shirt online and ordering him a new one, except that of course that shirt does not exist anywhere on the internet. There are shirts that have enormous sting rays and neon scribbles on them that say, “Galapagos!” and ones that say, “I heart boobies,” that are accented by a pair of blue feet, but we do not want those. I find a site for a non-profit—the Galapagos Conservatory—that sells some shirts that look similar to his and because I do not know what else to do, I write them a letter.

Hello,

I have what feels like an incredibly vapid, stupid question regarding the items you sell online through your site, so forgive me in advance for asking it. Do you ever sell the Galapagos Parque Nacional T-shirts with the Tortoise and the Hammerhead shark logo on them? We just got back from the Galapagos and bought only one souvenir to remember the trip...a size Medium sea green parque nacional t-shirt. And though the woman said the shirt was pre-shrunk, no sooner did we wash it than it shrunk so drastically that my husband can't wear it without looking like a thirteen year-old transvestite prostitute.

And it's just a stupid shirt, but we were sort of heartbroken. I can’t totally explain why. I figured I would be able to find it easily online and surprise him with a new one but I can't find it anywhere. This site seemed to have things similar to it so I figured I'd ask if it's something you once sold or may sell in the future. Please let me know-- if I can somehow purchase one through the site I'd happily donate some additional money to the cause.
Thank you and sorry for the stupid question. I just don't know who else to ask.

Sincerely,
Raquel D'Apice

And I sent the letter into the void, only to receive a reply two days later from someone saying, “I was touched by your letter, particularly by your description of your husband in his shrunken T-shirt. I will be visiting the Galapagos later this month for a meeting. Send me a picture of the shirt and I will try to pick you up a new one when I am down there.”

And I was somewhat floored but sent a photo attached to my next e-mail, and three weeks later we received a package from someone who I later learned is the president of the Galapagos Conservatory, with the T-shirt in a larger size and a note saying, “The next time I’m in Jersey City you can buy me a beer.”

The best thing about the Galapagos—you can say it by heart with me at this point, can’t you? The baby sea lions. I know. I repeat myself. But the second best thing is also the feeling of community. The camaraderie between other people who have been there and who care about it and who love it, even though their normal life has almost nothing to do with sea turtles or mangroves or flightless cormorants. Even though they sit in offices or on subways or in traffic, they have the memory of floating in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything, realizing that whatever it was they were worrying about is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.

Jonathan and I wake up in our own bed. One wall of our bedroom is painted brown and our comforter is blue, like the ocean. Not windex blue, like the shallow snorkeling water, but blue the color the ocean is painted on a map or a globe. This is the bedroom we will wake up in for at least the next couple of years, which is fine. Jonathan will get up and go to work and I will get up and go to work and we will both do some things each day, occasionally in each other’s company, and will go back to the bedroom and go to sleep. Most of the time nothing exciting will happen, which is why it is important to marry someone you really like. Because most of your life will be boring, so at least it will be boring with someone you love and care about who will laugh with you about how boring it is. I think of the line from the movie, Hook, that goes, "So...your adventures are over," and wonder if that has become true for us. Our adventures are over. For the first few weeks after the honeymoon we will squeal the phrase, “Baby sea lions!” at each other, but after a while we realize that that part of our life is officially finished and that it is time to move on.
I have no idea what I am doing. My adventures are not over but whatever new ones I face will be completely unfamiliar to me and I will be wholly unprepared for them, even with thirty years worth of life and experiences behind me. I turn to Jonathan who is sitting at his desk sending an e-mail and ask, “So, what now?”

He does not know either. But he turns to me, with confidence in his uncertainty, and sucks in his breath.

"Well," he says, “let’s think about getting a puppy.”

Multi-tasking

2010-09-02T02:23:50Z

I read an article in a newspaper about how people are overusing their electronic gadgets—using too many at once, using them constantly, not letting their brains rest—which in the grand scheme of things may or may not be bad for you. I’m not sure what newspaper it was. I’d like to say it was the Times, because it will make me sound smarter and it’s not unlikely, given that we have copies of the Times at work, but it just as easily could have been a Village Voice or a Metro or an AM that someone left on the seat of the train and that I picked up out of boredom—because I, like everyone in the article, am unable to just sit quietly with my thoughts.

When I read the article, I nodded critically through the first paragraph, which described a woman using an elliptical machine who was simultaneously watching TV, listening to her iPod and checking her e-mail.
“Not good,” I thought. “If I were on an elliptical machine,” I said to myself, “I would be content just to think really deep thoughts and be at peace with myself and not do any of that nonsense like the woman in the article.” Reading articles about people who are overly dependent on technology arouses a bizarre self-righteous streak, based on the fact that my iPod is broken and I have not gone to fix it—ignoring the fact that the reasons I have not fixed it have much more to do with laziness than with an aversion to using it. Also, I remind myself, the woman in the article is self-motivated enough to go to the gym and use the elliptical machine. Still, I think—I must be a little bit better than she is. Somehow.

Today a woman on a bicycle rode past me—her phone pinned to her ear with her shoulder, having a conversation that did not even appear to be that important. I do not even listen to my iPod while I ride my bike because I would crash into a storefront window within 45 seconds, and I have never ridden my bike while watching TV and checking my e-mail, but again—I remind myself that I have done other things that might not be shown in a cycling safety video and that might be looked upon by my mother with displeasure. Jumping to mind immediately is my experience the other day riding my bike in traffic, which is dangerous to begin with, but I was certainly not helping matters by balancing an eleven gallon plastic garbage can from Bed Bath and Beyond on the tiny handlebar basket that was designed to hold quaint bags of locally grown Macintosh apples or fresh baguettes or impulsive tulip purchases.

And if you absolutely must balance a garbage can on your handlebars, let it be empty, rather than stuffed with your rain jacket and an umbrella and two packs of Ghirardelli peanut butter and chocolate squares and a bottle of shampoo and a toilet brush from the dollar store. There can be something romantic about a person on a bicycle, but the image of a young girl riding carefree down Parisian city streets is painfully incongruent with what I was attempting. I had placed the garbage can’s base in the bike basket and had tipped it back so that it was resting at a 45 degree angle. My hands gripped the handlebars, but my index fingers were outstretched in a feeble attempt to keep the garbage can from shifting side to side, and I was wearing my purple and blue Headwinds! helmet that was really cool looking when Pam got it for Christmas back in 1993, but which now made me look like a psychedelically-colored toadstool, struggling to balance the plastic monolith of a garbage can, navigating along a street with only slightly fewer craters than the moon.

This extremely precarious situation, which seemed as though it would end in a puddle of exploded shampoo and blood and Ghirardelli chocolate littered with plastic garbage can shards ended with me arriving home safely, incident free, with a completely intact garbage can in under 5 minutes.

Now here is another situation. I am walking out of the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop in the early evening. I am sending a text to a friend—so first off, there goes my claim at technological self-righteousness—I am walking while sending text messages that are not even that important. I am sending a text about how my tooth is falling apart, which is both true and painful and I don’t have much to say about it now other than, “brush your teeth, kids,” which will do nothing to persuade any generation of children to brush their teeth. Very few things will get kids to brush their teeth. Jonathan brushes religiously and never eats sugary candy and when I asked why he does that he said that when he was young he had a hot, blonde, Brazilian dentist who wore high heels to work and who made him swear he would stop eating candy after he needed 6 fillings over the course of a summer.

“When you’re a thirteen year old boy and your unbelievably sexy dentist tells you to stop eating candy, you just stop,” he explained.

So on a totally unrelated note—if you are trying to keep your children from ruining their teeth, there’s your answer. Hot dentists. After all the time and money wasted on promotional materials for Fluoride and high-end toothbrushes, the one thing that gets kids to brush regularly is a reminder from someone who looks like a Brazillian soap opera protagonist but whose name is followed by the letters D.D.S.

But it’s far too late for me and I was sending a text about how my tooth was falling apart and how much money I will have to spend in the upcoming years on dental work, and then following it with another text about the other ways in which I could have spent the money. (Vacations and real estate and large philanthropic donations to agencies that help children with cleft lip palates). And I looked up from the second text and put the phone away, in my pocket. But my mind was still elsewhere—that was the problem. My mind was still swirling through the future of my teeth and my dental work and the various types of pain I would have to endure and why it was so hard for me to stop eating family-size packs of Twizzlers when other people my age do not seem to be buying Twizzlers with the same relative frequency with which I myself purchase them. I was juggling all of this in my mind and was waiting to feel my pocket vibrate from my friend’s return text, and was running my tongue over my back molar in disappointment when, without warning, I walked directly into a man’s stomach.

I say specifically that I walked into a man’s stomach rather than “I walked right into someone,” because the experiences are different. To walk right into someone involves a bony, painful collision—a jagged tangle of the sharp-angled limbs of New Yorkers, but to walk into someone’s stomach is a softer experience—like being in a moon bounce, or like the comfort of your head hitting the pillow except instead of your head it is your whole body and instead of a pillow it is a man in a striped pink and yellow and white dress shirt who is ridiculously embarrassed because he was not really paying attention to where he was going either.

I remember exactly what he looked like, because he looked like a Japanese version of William Shatner, which was a jarring enough image to lodge itself in my short term memory. He had a jolly, rotund appearance, which are not adjectives that usually come to mind when I am describing Japanese people, but perhaps that was why he was walking through downtown Manhattan, distracted—he had been ousted from his homeland by a coalition of thin, severe, business-like Japanese people who forbade him to return until he had lost weight and adopted a less jovial outlook on existence. He was walking toward me, his expression happy but wistful, staring out at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. And I continued walking toward him, thinking, “He is going to move. At any second he is going to swerve to avoid hitting me, so I will just keep going straight. And we both continued walking toward each other at our constant speeds, like the trains in that math problem that left New York and Chicago at 1:05AM and 5:24AM respectively, and which are bound to meet in the middle at an undisclosed time. And when we were separated by a distance of no more than five feet he swiveled his head forward and noticed me but the shock of eye contact prevented either of us from moving off course at all, and that is when I walked directly into his stomach.

And one stereotype I have formed based on the Japanese people I have met is that they are extremely polite. And politeness being one of the few things my mother tried to teach me that took root (as opposed to, perhaps, not riding your bicycle with an eleven gallon garbage can balanced on the handlebars) I am also overly apologetic when I accidentally bump into people. And so I hit his stomach and began bouncing backward, away from him, and his face contorted with what seemed like unimaginable grief and he began crying out, “I’msoh-ree I’msoh-ree I’msoh-ree!” and I began saying, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry! Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” And he extended his open palms toward me, fingers outstretched, as if to demonstrate that he held no ill will in his hands and said again, “I’msoh-ree I’msoh-ree!” And I said “I’m SO sorry! I’m SO sorry!” and we both nodded and continued walking past each other.

And I don’t know that I learned anything from walking into him, since I’m certainly not going to stop texting while I walk. Emailing and listening to an iPod while on the elliptical—that I wouldn’t start since anyone who would do that is so obviously dependent on their devices and can’t just relax and enjoy the experience of being alive and it’s sad, isn’t it? For those people? But not me. I’m fine. I have no problems with trying to do too many things at once or with technology or with dependency. I’m totally fine. I bumped into one Japanese guy but that’s not a huge deal. But it was funny when it happened, which is why I decided to text my friend to let her know what had just happened. And as I texted I casually went through the turnstile for the PATH train, except that if you are busy texting someone about your funny encounter walking into a Japanese guy you will forget to swipe your card at the turnstile, and if you don’t swipe your card it is not so much a “turnstile” as it is a “vagina-smashing machine.”

And walking into a non-moving turnstile at full force is not like walking into a man’s soft belly. It is like someone hitting you in the genitals with a bat. Which is different. And painful. And may have done permanent damage. Although if you’re really worried about wearing out your body and doing permanent damage, the elliptical machine is supposed to be great for that—you can get a full day’s exercise with very little pressure on the knees and joints and if you’re so inclined you can go through your e-mail, watch TV, listen to your iPod, and check your text messages in case your idiot friend has sent you another message, telling you to guess what head-on collision she encountered today. You can laugh about it from your elliptical machine.

Waitressing.

2010-08-26T02:44:37Z

So I don’t know anything about any of these people that come into the restaurant but I figure things out as I go along. That’s just what inevitably happens when you’re around anyone. You start learning things about them.

Some things you figure out quickly. Anyone who so much as walks in to the restaurant and asks to eat there, you already know they’ve got a decent amount of money, since it’s not a cheap place. If it’s a party of three people and they’re all men in white collar dress shirts holding laptops, they are business people—probably in finance—who are going to sit at their table going over whatever boring presentation they will have to stay at the office late to finish, staring at the same computers they will use later in the evening to kiss their children goodnight through a skype video screen. If it is two women coming in it is usually girlfriends who work at fairly well-paying office jobs. They will want to have a glass of wine if they think they can get away with it and will tell fun stories about coworkers that are scandalous and will laugh throughout their lunch date, making me wish that I were out with one of my friends and that I could sit down and have a glass of wine, and that I could wear classy wool dresses with matching jackets without constantly worrying that I would spill sauce or dressing on them. Most days a large, awkward man comes in by himself, with a tote bag emblazoned with the logo of a charity on it and eats a bowl of oatmeal by himself with a decaf coffee, and he is always very polite but always pays in cash so I don’t know his name. But I know that he is not a business person and that he is not meeting a girlfriend for a quick lunch, and I know that he clearly has somewhere to be because he is always politely in a rush and never stays more than fifteen minutes.

And it’s not that you’re scrutinizing these people, but you have to learn about them as quickly as you can because it’s your job to make them happy and you’ve only just met them two minutes ago and the only question you’ve asked them is whether they would like bread and whether tap water is ok.

A bunch of people come in at once because that’s how it always is in restaurants and retail stores. It’s one of the unexplained mysteries of the universe. No one will come in for an hour and you will stand there, wishing you could finish the crossword puzzle you started on the train or read a chapter of whatever book you were reading or log on to your facebook account and type in, “is bored” as your status, and then seven parties will show up at the same time, all sitting down at once, asking why you are understaffed. In this rush there are two couples where the guy is clearly in finance, one mother with a new baby meeting a friend, two sets of girlfriends, two Europeans, and a family.

So right off the bat I get started—everyone gets water and the European couple get sparkling water because Europeans are biologically unable to drink non carbonated water—it will make them lose their accents and their sense of style and they will start forgetting current events and the names of various world leaders. Everyone gets bread and I run through the menu with everyone because there are some things on the menu that are very good and there are some things that are not so good and I want the people to order the good things so that after their meal they will go, “You were right! That was amazing! You are the best waitress in the history of time!” And I will say, “Thank you! Wasn’t it wonderful! I know!” and get all excited. And I will stand there, beaming as if someone has pinned a gold star to my chest.

Sometimes the people will say, “Is this appetizer with the olives good?” and you can’t say, “No, it’s terrible-- it will give you dry mouth.” But you can point out the things on the menu that will not give you dry mouth and strongly hint at those, and you can keep mentioning to the manager that we should really take the olive appetizer off the menu because every time someone insists on ordering it you feel overwhelmingly guilty, even though you are neither Jewish nor Catholic.

The last order I take is the one for the family—not because I save them for last, but because they were not ready to order for ten minutes or so. And I try to look at them and figure them out. They are all very well dressed, but you don’t really know what anyone’s like until they’ve talked for a little bit. And I walk up to them and say, “Hi” and ask how they are and the mother says, “We’re ready to order” without looking up, and then says, “Emma?” And the mother is not smiling and the young girl goes, “May I please have the burger and a coke?” And I say, “Of course.” And she says, “Thankyouverymuch,” and smiles at me because I am smiling. And her brother says, “May I please have the chicken, please?” And I say, “Absolutely,” and he says “thank you very much” and smiles, like his sister.

Both kids are smiling and I am making a sort of wacky ‘neither of your parents is looking at us so I am making faces at you’ face, and they both smile and laugh a little. And I say, “Wow—you guys are so ridiculously polite. I am so impressed.” Which is true. I am. And the mother says, “Daniel? Daniel?” to the father, but he is on his cell phone and holds up his hand to indicate that he cannot talk yet. He is wearing sunglasses at the table, and a light blue polo shirt and an artsy necklace that I can tell was very expensive and that he probably bought somewhere in SoHo but that looks very stupid on him. It was intended to make him look hip and like a player, possibly, despite his two children in tow, but it mainly makes him look very sad and it makes his neck look sort of fat.

“So the mother says, “Daniel?” and then sighs loudly and the little girl frowns and pretends to be very busy fidgeting with the room card key, since they are staying in the hotel next door. And the mother says, “You know what? Just get him this,” and she points on the menu to a description of a strip steak. “Just order us one of those and we’ll just share it.” And when she has made clear what she wants she immediately ceases to notice that I exist, and begins staring across the table at her husband with a blank, mildly irritated expression. I step away from the table, which is eerily quiet. Several minutes later I notice that the husband has moved to the table by the front door to continue his conversation and that the mother and children are still not talking. The little girl continues gripping the room key card.

Their food comes and the father sits back down with them. I ask if they need anything else and the mother says, “No, we’re fine,” and they eat in silence. And they ask for the bill and pay it and halfway through the process the father begins making another phone call, getting up to sit at the table by the doorway. And the mother gets up and goes, “Daniel, I need the room key. Daniel? Daniel, we need the room key, do you have the room key? Didn’t you say you were holding on to the room key?” And Daniel puts up his hand to indicate that this phone call is way too important to be interrupted and the whole time I am thinking, “Emma has it. Your daughter has the room key. Was no one else at the table paying attention? She’s been holding it for thirty minutes.” And finally the daughter pipes up quietly and says, “I have the room key.” And the mother takes it and the three of them walk up to their room and the father follows, ten minutes later, hanging up his phone and sauntering into the hotel.

It is always hard to see people who are so fundamentally unhappy and be unable to do anything other than offer them orange juice. Most people are just normal amounts of unhappy, which means they’re just tired or their hair looks terrible that day and they know it, or they have so much work in their inbox they’re thinking of setting their cubicle on fire and admitting themselves to the inpatient unit at a local mental hospital. And you can fix that—or not fix it so much as distract them from it or remind them (without actually reminding them) that it is not the end of the world. And they will laugh about it and drink their diet cokes and leave thinking that things will maybe be ok and that they will not admit themselves to the mental hospital just yet and will only set fire to a few of the things in their inbox.

But this is what got me today…the thing that is even harder than seeing people who are fundamentally unhappy is seeing fundamentally unhappy people with children who are still a little bit innocent. Because I always feel like I am watching a smiling seven year-old, confused as to why her mother will not look at her, and am giving her a death sentence. “Here,” I am saying. “Here you go, girl who smiled when I payed attention to her. Go live with this woman and this man for the next ten years and I promise when you’re finished you’ll have nothing left to smile about.”

There is something so difficult about watching and being unable to do anything. Obviously I cannot just pick up the kids, one under each arm, and say, “I’m sorry but you folks are doing a shitty job and I’m taking your two kids to live with me in my apartment so that they won’t grow up to be miserable people.” As a waitress you are not allowed to kidnap the children of your customers. That’s one of the basic rules of waitressing—right up there with, “greet people within two minutes after they are seated” and “always have your hair tied back.”

The European couple is done eating and a pair of women at table 10 are making a friendly motion indicating that they need more coffee. I go up to them to see if there is anything else they need. If they want dessert I will recommend the chocolate mousse, which is amazing, or whatever that peach thing is with the raspberries that we sell. I make a mental note to remember the name of it so I don’t have to call it “the peach thing with the raspberries,” in the future. The Europeans want lattes, they say politely. I wonder if, in addition to the lattes, I can convince them to adopt two sad-looking American children trapped in a horrible family but probably I will have no luck. American children have spent years drinking regular non-sparkling water right out of the tap and they don’t know the names of many world leaders and the Europeans would be unable to relate to them. Maybe the two women will want to adopt them, except probably not since they have to go back to the office after this and they have about 30 thousand hours of paperwork to go through over the next two days. They will feel bad about not adopting them, because they are nice women, but rules are rules. You cannot steal kids from a family even if you feel bad for them. You have to just keep doing your thing—whatever your thing is—administrative nonsense or waitressing or boring powerpoint presentations about projected profits for some stupid company. You cannot just take people’s kids away from them just because they are doing a bad job.

My manager tells me I’m cut for the day and I print out all my paperwork and tip out my busboy and my runner and my bartender and get ready to leave. As I walk toward the stairs the family re-emerges from the hotel, each with a rolling suitcase in tow. The doorman says, “Cab?” and the mother says, “Cab. Get us a cab,” and the father is still on the phone, ignoring everyone. I look at the little girl, who is gripping the handle of her rolling suitcase. She looks over briefly and I make a ridiculous face, which is even more ridiculous given that I am aware of the general unhappiness of the situation. I cross my eyes and pull my jaw to one side and stick my tongue out for an instant, making sure that her parents don’t see what I am doing.

And she smiles for a split second and then looks down at the ground immediately.
And I think, “I’m sorry that there’s nothing else I can do for you.” And if she could read minds she would nod and say, “It’s fine. Thank you so much for trying.”
And I would say, “That’s what I love about you kids—you’re so polite.” And she would smile, gently, without her mother seeing, and say, “Thank you so much for noticing.”

A picture is worth 1,000 words. And we took over 2,000 pictures, so you do the math.

2010-06-28T23:48:07Z

The Bride and Groom. And Karen.

Pam and her husband Joe. The "normal ones in the family."

Pam.

Cherry Tomato.

Too Famous. No pictures.

Ew, gross. Kissing.

There were dinner rolls...

...and confusion about how the camera worked.

And as "they" say (whoever "they" are), "All's well that ends well."

When your cousins eat half the flowers out of your centerpieces, the wedding is considered a success.

For anyone who wanted it for themself.

2010-06-10T13:32:37Z

Rain

2010-06-10T04:21:33Z

So I’m running up the stairs of the PATH station escalator, passing people on the right hand side of the escalator who are just standing there, waiting out the ride to the top. It’s a narrow escalator, so I have to squeeze past them and to each person have to say, “Excuse me, sorry, excuse me, pardon me, sorry,” which is stupid because then I get to the top of the escalator, to the metal gazebo-like thing that covers it, and discover that it is pouring rain and I cannot go anywhere without getting horrifically wet, and all the people I passed now pass me, opening their black umbrellas and being carried off into the distance.

I stand by the top of the escalator, waiting but wanting to run, wanting to be home, doing this horribly impatient thing I do where I keep looking up and going, “Maybe the rain has stopped now? No… now? No, now?” And there are only 3 or 4 seconds between ‘nows,’ as if I am hoping god will notice that I am anxious and will go, “Oh, Raquel, I am so sorry! Let me make it stop raining for you!”

This is a thing I do a lot lately, I find. I will be anxious and check things again and again. Lately if am trapped in the house for a day with nothing to do I will occasionally update my Facebook status and then look back to see if anyone has commented on it. And then look back again. And then look back one final time, and no one has said anything or even ‘liked’ it and I go, “Ok, I guess I am worthless then,” even if it has only been seven minutes since I put it up.
And I know I am not worthless. Many times I feel so insanely not worthless I wonder if I should poke holes in my overly-inflated ego, but there is something about saying something that no one is responding to that makes you feel as alone in this world as you actually are. The problem with talking to people online is that you occasionally feel like you are having a conversation and you realize that sometimes you are just standing there, talking to yourself like an idiot.

But anyway—I am at the PATH station, anxious, and a little bit wet from the rain that the wind is blowing horizontally. I am standing under the gazebo-like thing that covers the PATH station and am going, “Make it stop raining so I can go home!” I can see my bicycle from where I am standing, chained to a tiny tree and there is water dripping off the handlebars and the seat. I start putting on my bike helmet with the thought that, “In the time it takes me to put this on, probably the rain will slow down,” as if it takes more than seven seconds to put on and fasten the strap of a bicycle helmet. And the rain, as if to laugh in my face, becomes twice as intense. “Now not only are you stuck here,” it says, “but you are stuck here looking like an idiot in a bike helmet.”

I grumble and bite my lip and pull out my Blackberry and decide I will check my e-mail. Fuck you, rain, I needed to check my e-mail anyway and now is the perfect time—standing under this beautiful gazebo, surrounded by the pattering of rain. Thank you so much, rain, for this perfect e-mail checking opportunity. I smirk at the clouds, but I am not fooling anyone and glance briefly at the sky. It is still raining. Obviously. Obviously obviously it is still raining. I open my yahoo account and there are three e-mails about the wedding—the wonderful, exciting, beautiful, but ridiculously complex wedding that I am both thrilled about and tired of planning. The problem with planning a wedding is that it is difficult to plan anything else and you begin to feel as if the wedding is the end of your life. You will have a great, exciting wedding and that after that nothing will happen—it will just fade to black and maybe the credits will roll, but all of the things you have worked so hard for will be over. And you have asked your friends if this is normal and they say yes, it is normal, everyone feels like this in the weeks before their wedding.

I look up at the sky and it is still raining. I am trying to remember what my life was life before the wedding nonsense, before the engagement, and I remember enjoying it. I remember that there were good parts and bad parts, which is the same as my life is now. There are still good parts and bad parts…they are different than the good and bad parts before, but the ratio is mainly the same. I respond to one of the e-mails—it is about seating charts. I responded to three today that were about cocktail hours and music and something else…at this point I can’t remember or care. They are all about planning. Planning for a day three weeks from now that will be fun and exciting and then almost immediately will be over.

And then, I think…what? What happens when it is over? Every movie I have seen stops there—when the couple who have had so much trouble finding true love find true love and then they get married and then the movie is over. They never show what happens the next day. Maybe the entire earth evaporates. Probably not, but maybe it does. They never tell you. But I am rushing toward it—rushing home to fall asleep and wake up and be one day closer to the day I find out what happens. It can’t all be wonderful. I know that because nothing is all wonderful, but I want to get there already—I want to have it happen and then be over so that I can find out what the rest of my life is going to be about and I can throw myself into it, two and a half weeks from now, when it starts.

I stand there, like an idiot in my bike helmet. It is still raining and I am sighing loudly, as if that is going to accomplish something. I close out of my e-mail and suddenly re-notice the wallpaper on my Blackberry. It is a picture I had taken in the 23rd street PATH station of a travel poster that said, “SMILE! You are in SPAIN!” except that someone had crossed out the final “s” and it read, “SMILE! You are in PAIN!” When I took the picture I thought it was wonderful and for weeks I would read it over and over again, but it had been almost a month since I had even really seen it…like everything else, you stop noticing it after a while, the same way I stopped noticing the picture of a sunflower I had as my wallpaper before that. I read it again, “SMILE! You are in PAIN!” and I smile.

I walk out from the gazebo. It is raining so hard I can hear it bouncing off the plastic of my bike helmet and my pants are already soaked before I have even reached my bicycle. I unlock my bike and sit on the dripping wet seat and water flies into my eyes from all directions. “Smile!” I think, “You are in pain.”

And I begin pedaling home. I am moving fast again, because I am anxious, but halfway through the trip I slow down. I am soaking wet. I am not going to get any less wet by speeding through the trip. I crouch down over my handlebars and coast down the middle of the street, the rain hitting me like bullets. I arrive home after 3 minutes and walk my bike up the stairs, leaving a trail of water in its wake. I am home—the place I had wanted to be so badly. I change clothes and Jonathan dries me with the hairdryer in the kitchen until my knees are scorched and I am not cold anymore. We talk for a little while and eat something together, and then he walks off to work on a submission letter for one of his poems.
I sit down at the computer, exhausted and there is another wedding e-mail sitting in my inbox. I sigh. They are never-ending, like the rain that is still coming down in sheets outside the window. I know that I will have to deal with it eventually but not now. For now I sit at my computer and open a Microsoft Word document and type down all of this nonsense that happened an hour ago. It is not particularly well-organized, but it feels good to do it.

I am almost always writing things in my head and then, if I have the chance, getting them down on paper. The other day I was buying an Italian Ice off the street and the vendor didn’t have lemon and I wrote out in my head, “I am buying an Italian Ice from the vendor next to the elementary school and he doesn’t have lemon. And I think, 'maybe I could buy the Rainbow flavor and just eat the middle, lemon-flavored part,' but no, that would make me look like an idiot.”

I was running up the escalator stairs and in my head I began going, “I am running up the escalator stairs, passing people on the right hand side of the escalator.” And I came home and wrote this down, not knowing why exactly some part of my brain had imbued it with importance. I will open the wedding e-mail tomorrow, or the next day. There is no rush. I don’t know why I am rushing all the time lately. It feels good to do something that is not wedding-related—something that you did before the wedding and will continue to do after.

I get a glass of milk and drink it slowly. "Smile! You are in pain," I think. I am smiling. I am not in much pain anymore—just tired. But I am finally able to relax, which is nice. I sit back and ignore the responsibilities that I will probably have to address tomorrow, and write an essay for no reason.
When I am finished writing it I check my Facebook page. Seven people have responded.

Part of Why I Love Pam So Much

2010-05-03T20:40:37Z

"I think your cake idea is a good idea," Pam says in earnest, turning from the road momentarily to look at me. She looks back at the stoplight, which turns green and her foot gently presses the gas.

"But they might charge more."

"Yeah, but it's a good idea," Pam says.

My cake idea was to do away with the idea of a wedding cake, since I was not particularly enamored of most wedding cake designs, and to replace it with a series of different types of cakes that I loved: Mousse cakes, cheese cakes, cookie cakes. If there were a way to get a Fudgie the Whale cake smuggled into the wedding, I wanted that too. I had been told by the kind but somewhat confused woman at the bakery that having a bunch of cakes wasn't technically included in the package, and that the wedding venue might charge us extra for it, so I had spent the next 10 minutes getting used to the idea of just having a regular wedding cake.

"I wouldn't mind having a regular cake if..." I stopped myself. "Ok-- this is the first idea that popped into my head, and I can tell you in advance that this is a horrible idea and nothing mom would ever allow me to do."

"What is it?"

"It's really bad."

"I'm sure it's really bad," Pam said. "But what is it?"

"I would have a regular wedding cake," I began slowly, "if they could do a normal size cake with a bunch of tiers, and then on top instead of a bride and a groom they had two lovebirds or doves or something-- a boy dove and a girl dove..." I paused, hesitant. "And then all over the cake they could put realistic-looking birdshit. And obviously it wouldn't really be birdshit-- it would be icing designed to look like there were these two lovebirds that had shit all over the cake."

"It would be funny," Pam admitted.

"But gross," I said.

"Yes."

"And no one would be able to eat the cake," I admitted, "but no one really cares about wedding cake anyway. But it would be memorable."

"Definitely no one would be able to eat the cake," she said. "But the thing that's holding me up is the birds. What do you mean 'a boy dove and a girl dove?' Is one of them going to have long hair or a moustache or something?"

I sat in the car, silent.

"I don't know," I admitted.

We drove in silence for several seconds.

"Oh, of course," Pam said suddenly, unprompted. "Testes. We'll give one of the birds enormous testes."

And with that she turned back toward the road in her high ponytail and enormous Ann Taylor sunglasses, as if the matter had been settled. And the words my mother had always said to me growing up-- "someday you will be so happy you have sisters"-- reverberated throughout the car and out into the streets.

Do It Yourself: How to Plan a Wedding Without Wanting to Throw Yourself in Front of a Truck

2010-03-18T18:46:15Z

There is a camel-colored notebook in my parent’s house, unused except for the first college-ruled page, on which there is a list written in my mother’s handwriting. It is entitled, “Things That Went Wrong.” The first items listed are as follows.

1. Ross breaks into the church with a crowbar.

2. Ross is wearing one black sock, one navy sock.

I had unearthed the notebook as a child, coming across it in the downstairs closet while looking for pads of drawing paper. I treated it as a great anthropological find, being that the list was dated 1977, three years before my birth, and that it solidified the fact that I knew in my head but not my heart—that my parents had existed before I was born.

I carried the notebook up to my mother, holding it as though it might at any moment crumble to dust. It was from 1977 and I considered anything from before my birth to be very, very old—as if perhaps we had saved this notebook from the library at Alexandria or found it alongside the Dead Sea scrolls, storing it (for safety) in the closet next to the typewriter equipment.

“Where did you find this?” my mother asked.

“Downstairs.”

“This is a list of the things that went wrong at our wedding,” she said, running her finger down the page. She is smiling, and highlights the first item with her nail. “Your father and Reverend Matos showed up at the church and the doors were iced shut because it was January. They had to pry the door open with a crowbar.” She continued down the list with her finger, occasionally rolling her eyes. “Never get married in January,” she said.

In the photographs from their wedding my parents look very happy but my mother frowns when she looks at the pictures because her face is shiny in some of them.

“If you ever get married,” she said, “hire a professional photographer who knows what he’s doing. If people’s faces are shiny, the photographer is supposed to tell them so that it doesn’t ruin the pictures.

“I think your pictures are nice,” I told her.

“Yes, but look at my face,” she would say, frowning, and I would look at it and think that her face looked very beautiful.

My mother got married in January of 1977 after meeting my father in March of 1976. They had met on a blind date, set up by her friend Chickie, who was one of the Spanish Language interpreters in the courthouse where my father worked. My mother was 29 and my father was 30 and they got married at the Fort Hamilton Officer’s Club on a January day cold enough for the doors of their Brooklyn church to freeze closed. And my father, who loved my mother and wanted to marry her very much, chipped away at the ice with a crowbar he kept in his car for emergencies, wearing one black sock and one navy sock with his tuxedo.

* * *

I am sitting across from a woman who organizes weddings on what I will call the Blippity Bloop estate. She is wearing a charcoal suit and a pastel shirt with an eggshell-colored ruffle around the collar and I am wearing nice jeans and a top I ironed without being asked. I am holding hands under the table with Jonathan, who a year ago I had not yet met—had not even known existed, and the wedding organizer is going, “Here at Blippity Bloop, you have the option of the big room only, or the small room for cocktails and the big room for the reception. And if you’re using both rooms, we offer the Bleepity Blart package, which includes an entire waterfall of appetizers, and a roast duck for everyone, and live, dancing lobsters, and scallops wrapped in five-dollar bills, and magic and happiness and clouds. That’s the first option. And if you don’t want that,” she continues, “we have the Bloppity Bleek package, which includes everything from the Bleepity Blart package, except no magic and no clouds, and only a few of the lobsters are dancing,” she says, “but not that well.”

Jonathan and I look at her, saying nothing.

“And we also offer a very basic Blankety Blink package,” she finishes, “which is only one butler-passed appetizer. One pig in one blanket on one tray and immediately after someone eats it, the wedding is over and everybody goes home sad.”

“How much is that one?” I ask.

“Which?” she asks.

“The Blankety Blink.”

She opens a folder and pulls out several sheets of paper, pushing them across the table toward me and placing the tip of her pen alongside prices.

“The Blankety Blink,” she says, “is a million billion per person.” She pauses momentarily as we process the information, sliding her pen down the page. “That’s for an evening wedding. If you’re doing an afternoon wedding it’s from 11AM to 4PM and it’s only nine hundred thousand per person, but an additional $40 a head if you’d like the bar to serve anything other than rubbing alcohol.”
We had mentioned to the woman that we would like to have our ceremony on-site and she had shown us to a room with a fireplace at the hearth and had said that my bridal party and I could enter from one of two ways—either through what appeared to be the door of a small linen closet, or descending from a staircase eerily reminiscent of the Carol Burnett “Gone With the Wind” Parody, which I would have considered only if my wedding dress had a curtain rod thrust through the shoulders.

“Thank you very much,” I say to the woman, and she rises from her seat, placing one of her hands on the dark mahogany table to steady herself, leaning over to shake both my and Jonathan’s hands.
“Thank you,” she says, and I am reminded of many of the dates I went on before meeting Jonathan, where you part from the date civilly but are secretly thrilled to be ending the encounter, knowing that you will never see the person again and will think of them (from this point on) with an involuntary shudder of relief.

It is the third wedding hall I have seen this week.

* * *

Jonathan proposed before we had known each other a year. He was tall and smiled a lot and was a Spanish Interpreter for the court system and spoke four languages but did not mind that I spoke only one. He had climbed Mt. Fuji and been to clown school. He wrote poetry and could dance and when I found spiders in my apartment he would trap them under a glass and set them free outside instead of killing them. Jonathan had wanted to propose in Venice during our three-week trip to Italy but was unable to wait that long and proposed in Rome, on the Ides of March, two days into the trip. I had never wanted an engagement ring and so he had knelt and presented me with a Valentine’s Day card of the sort you distribute to your third grade class, on which was written,

“Will you marry me?”
Love,
Jonathan

And it was very shy and sweet and reminded me of the notes passed in study hall asking,

“Do you like me? Check yes or no.”

and I wanted to pull a black pen from my shoulder bag and check off, “Yes, off course I will marry you. I would be honored to marry you. You are the greatest, most wonderful person I have ever met.”

* * *

This time the wedding coordinator has long, brown hair with side swept bangs and reminds me of a corporate version of a girl from my high school English class. She uses long, extended-arm gestures to show me the property, grinning, as if I am constantly winning a new car on a game show.

“This is going to be your ceremony site,” she says, “So you’d walk down the aisle toward the river—do you want to do a practice walk?” she asks, and I can tell from her voice that there is an incredibly large percentage of women and girls who say yes, they do want to do a practice walk. During my sister’s wedding, her fiancé had suggested that she sprint down the aisle, followed by an Indiana Jones-sized boulder, and that he would swing in on a rope and rescue her and my mother had said, “No—you’re supposed to walk down the aisle very slowly,” as if the sprinting had been the part of his suggestion that had been the most ridiculous, and on which she should offer clarification.

“Slowly,” my mother said. “Imagine there are people in front of you,” she offered, “and you’re waiting for them to move,” and I instantly imagined myself standing in the aisle for 40 minutes, hand on the hip of my wedding dress as I tapped my foot and glanced at my watch. In my right hand I would hold my bouquet and in my left, the crumpled forms needed to renew my driver’s license.

“So you walk down here,” the coordinator says, still gesturing with her arms, walking me through the ceremony as if she is choreographing a musical, “you walk down through this area, which can easily accommodate up to three hundred and twenty chairs—we’ve done it before. Ok? So three hundred and twenty chairs, and if you’re doing an evening wedding you’ll be saying your vows around sunset, so the sun will be going down, which is beautiful for the photographer. And you kiss, and then you’re going to walk back toward here,” she says, as I follow her, “entering through this door,” she swings open a glass door and waits for me to walk through before she herself enters, “and then you’re here and its your cocktail reception, Ok?”

I nod vaguely, wondering what happens in act two.

* * *

The curtain opens and it is clearly a flashback—you can tell from the lighting, which is sort of yellowish—and there is a woman in a royal blue jogging suit and pigtails. The woman is wearing aviator sunglasses and stretching and I realize that it is my mother. She has incredibly white teeth and is smiling at someone. Beside her, a younger, skinnier version of my father is wearing a polo shirt and athletic shorts with blue piping—the shorts cover only the top third of his blindingly white thighs, as was the style during what I can only assume was the horrific fabric shortage of the 1970’s. My father is not stretching, but is standing, leaning against the bare white, undecorated wall. He is smiling.

There are no children, only the young couple enjoying each other’s company, though the woman peers into the baby carriages of strangers more frequently than she did when she was single. Their apartment is well furnished. It has evolved past the transitory haphazardness of a single person’s apartment and is devoid of posters tacked to walls and random, unmatched dishes inherited from family members. It is the apartment of a couple who own a matching sheet set and a food processor and who lie in bed early Sunday morning, looking out the window at their tree-lined street.

The couple looks happy, despite the fact that there is nothing interesting happening. There are no people dancing in the background and no hors d’oeuvres being passed and no one is cutting an enormous cake topped by a small, plastic likeness of themselves. There are no kick lines and no one holding a microphone and no one in a fantastically long dress hurling flowers into the air. There is just the woman, stretching in her jogging suit and aviators and the man, standing casually against the wall, next to a lightswitch plate surrounded by smudged fingerprints.

“This is right after we got married,” my mother says, gesturing to the photo. “Why I’m wearing those glasses I have no idea.”

“I’ve seen you wear worse glasses than those,” I offer.

“Thank you,” she says. She turns to the next photo, another shot of my father, and my mother smiles.

* * *

I am looking at a place with a tent that sits alongside the river. It is a large white tent that seats 300 and, weather permitting, the cocktail reception is outside, in chairs that look out onto the Hudson, and there is a partially obscured view of Indian Point, the nuclear power plant, which is only a mile or so away. Its immediate visage is comforting, assuring me that, should there be any malfunction, the entire wedding will be instantaneously vaporized, rather than my guests suffering the slow painful death of radiation poisoning.

“So this is what you want?” my mother asks, reviewing the folder for the site. “This is the one you really like?”

“This one is nice,” I say. I avoid answering the question, ‘Is this what you want?’ because what I wanted, I remember, was a backyard barbeque for 250 people, with coolers full of Negra Modelo and Stella Artois and a man whose only purpose is to keep running back to the supermarket to buy more chips. I mentioned this to my mother once, early on, and I recognized her expression as the face of someone who wants something vastly different, but is also determined that I be happy. It is the quintessential facial expression of a good mother.

“Our house isn’t big enough to do something like that,” she said quietly. “But if you really want we can try paring down the lists. We can just go through them person by person.”

“I don’t really want to pare down the list,” I admitted.

“Not your friends,” she said. “Your friends can all come—it’s your wedding. But maybe some of the people dad and I know…”

“I don’t want you to have to pare down your people either,” I told her.

“We know a lot of people,” she said. “A lot of friends and a lot of family.”

“Good,” I said.

“So you’re sure this is what you want?” my mother asked.

“I want the people coming to have a good time.”

“They will.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want.”

I would get married here or I would get married somewhere else. I would walk anywhere they wanted me to walk. Down to the ceremony, up to the altar, back down the aisle, shake hands with people—some of whom you know, some of whom you don’t—walk down toward the river for photographs, including several (despite my mother’s protests) with the nuclear power plant in the background, back up to the cocktail hour, and over to the other side of the property for the reception. Sit through toasts and speeches. Listen, as my grandfather gives a toast that is very sentimental and sweet and that will somehow segue into an oral family history that makes four separate mentions of World War II. Dance through the reception, intermittently saying hello to people my parents know and my next door neighbors and someone my mother used to teach with and a friend of mine from nursery school, occasionally eating something, shaking hands, dancing, thanking people for coming, telling them I had a wonderful time, and I exit stage left, taking off my costume and telling people, “Good show! Great show tonight!” and high-fiving the tech workers, asking if they are meeting us later for a drink.

And the clock will strike twelve and my dress (which will already be in a closet hanging up somewhere) will turn into a pair of jeans with a bleach stain on them and my glass slippers will turn into size 11 Saucony running shoes that my mother wishes I would throw away. My contact lenses turn back into debilitating myopia and the waiters at the reception site will turn back into mice or actors or freelance graphic designers who are looking for work and my bridal suite will disappear, turning into a sofa in a living room where I accidentally fell asleep without meaning to. And it will all be over and we will all return to our lives.

* * *

I am sitting on Jonathan’s futon in my black sweatpants and a T-shirt whose seams have ripped in both armpits but which I keep meaning to fix. I am wearing my glasses, reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I had always meant to read but am just now getting around to. Jonathan walks in from the other room where he was sending out submissions to literary magazines and eating peanut butter cups.

He is wearing a T-shirt from his high school graduation, which was 15 years ago and kisses me on the forehead and I put down my book and he sits down beside me on the futon. He has a slight ingrown hair on his arm and I ask if I can try and get it out and he says no, please no…he will get it out later, and last time I asked to pull out one of his hairs it hurt a lot. And I apologize and he says don’t worry, it wasn’t my fault, he just wants to take care of his own hairs.

And so far this may not seem that exciting, but right then—right at that point he does something spontaneous, like saying, “Do we have enough recycling to fill up a full bag tonight or should I wait until Thursday to take it out?”

And I, taken aback at how much my life resembles the plot of The Bourne Identity or Mission Impossible, say something edgy and dangerous, like, “Did you get my message that your mom called and the 29th is fine? Everyone’s good with the 29th.”

And Jonathan, completely overwhelmed by the thought (the thought!) that his mother has left him a message and that the 29th is fine with everyone, does something electrifying, like looking at the wall next to the bathroom and commenting that we might have water damage and that he should probably call the landlady.
My head thumps with adrenaline and I find myself frantic, excited, doing something outlandish and passionate like saying, “Yeah—give her a call,” while brushing biscotti crumbs off the lap of my sweatpants.
And we look at each other—madly, unbelievably in love—he pointing to the phone, indicating that he is leaving the landlady a message.

* * *

If you are hoping to have a lasting relationship, you can choose from one of these three packages.

The A #1 Super Best Relationship package, which includes a completely free daily yacht ride from the French Riviera to Cape Town, South Africa, an oil well that smells like fresh rainwater, a baby snow leopard with no claws and no teeth, and a Yves Saint Laurent sleeping bag lined with the feathers of extinct Moa birds. The A #1 Super Best includes unlimited access to Sigourney Weaver’s e-mail account (you can read all her mail!), and four oxen and two wagon axles and the ability to fly at altitudes of up to 15,000 ft. (to breathe underwater is an additional $21.50 per person). You receive a lifetime subscription to Marie Claire and Smithsonian Magazine and unlimited good hair days and you will be included in this year’s edition of The Guinness Book of world records without even doing anything noteworthy, with your picture alongside the picture of the world’s fattest twins, both of whom are posing on motorcycles.

If that doesn’t work for you we have the #2 Still Great But Not As Great Relationship Wonder Package, which is similar to the above package, except that your sleeping bag will be lined with the feathers of a bird that has not yet gone extinct and you get only 2 oxen and 1 wagon axle and your oil well smells like oil. Also, you will still be in the Guinness Book of World Records, but your picture is nowhere near the fat motorcycle twins and is somewhere in the back where probably no one will find it.

And last off we have the #3 Totally Regular Relationship Non-Wonder Package, which involves nothing from either the above packages. You do not have the ability to fly and you do not get a baby snow leopard with no claws and no teeth and you do not appear in the Guinness Book of World Records at all—many of the world’s citizens will live their entire lives, never knowing of your existence.
You get a small apartment in Jersey City with a toilet that works some of the time and a non-ergonomic desk chair that you will probably have to replace. You get recycling, but not quite enough to have a full bag, where you would need to take it out tonight, and you get voicemail messages from your parents and if you do not wipe things up in the kitchen as soon as you spill them, you get ants.
And you get someone who, if you ask them to get rid of the ants, will help you get rid of the ants— trapping them between a glass and a piece of cardboard and setting them free outside, next to the porch. You get someone who does not think less of you for being the type of person who squashes ants with her shoe, rather than releasing them back into the wild like she would if she were a better person.
With the #3 Totally Regular Relationship Non-Wonder Package, you get someone who does not expect you to be perfect—someone who will not mind that you sometimes walk around the apartment with your shirt on backwards or your socks inside out and who will wake up next to you every morning smiling at you, their face on the white sheets illuminated by sunlight because neither of you can remember to buy curtains. The person will look at you and tell you you look beautiful and really think it is true, even though you know for a fact you fell asleep wearing eyeliner and look like a child has been drawing on your face with a piece of charcoal.

And it is not that you will be deluded into thinking this particular relationship package is perfect. You will be well aware that it isn’t. But after the imperfect wedding that begins your imperfect life together, you will sit down at a table with your small, camel-colored notebook, and make a list entitled, “Things That Went Wrong.”

Your pen will write things like:

1.) Wore one black sock and one navy sock

2.) Gave best man wrong boutonniere

3.) Went to new barber and received unflattering haircut before wedding

4.) Neglected to powder face between photographs

You will list all of the things that went wrong. You will write them out, one after the other, before closing the tan cover and putting the notebook aside somewhere, tucked into a closet for your unborn daughter to find when she is looking for scrap paper. You will change into your royal blue tracksuit and stretch on the floor of your bedroom, and if you hear keys jingling in the lock of the front door it will mean the person you have just married has gotten back from his Saturday morning errands and has come home to spend time with you. You smile, pulling yourself off the floor and fumbling for the aviator-style glasses on your night table.

He unlocks the door with his house key and calls your name and your heart jumps a little. It is not nearly as dramatic as breaking into a church with a crowbar, but is much more practical in the long run.

March 24th, 2010

2010-03-09T21:19:34Z

For anyone who's in the Boston area on March 24th, I'm a participant in the Women in Comedy Festival humor writing competition and will be reading my pomegranate-themed essay, "Things I learned from Holly" at Improv Boston. The show is 9PM to 10:30PM. Tickets are $7. And now you know as much about it as I do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the woman who started it all...

2010-02-22T15:19:31Z

So first off, I’m aware that you’re going to think I’m weird and maybe disgusting, but I’m fine with that—I was fine with that years ago. But I’m sitting here on the beat-up love seat that used to be in my parents’ living room, holding the waistband of my late grandmother’s underpants and wrapping it around my hand like rosary beads. I wrap the band tightly, so that I can feel the squeeze of the elastic, and then release it so that the soft, gray writing becomes legible and I find myself mumbling the words, “Hanes Her Way,” the way other people whisper Hail Marys.

And I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Excuse me? Her underpants?” but it’s not her underpants, it’s only the waistband of her underpants, because when my grandmother was through with a pair of underpants she would cut off the waistband and use it as a giant rubber band for holding her watercolor paintings together when she was transporting them to art shows. She had dozens of underpants’ waistbands hanging from the doorknob in her art studio and I took one the last time I was at her house—slipping it into my pocket, hoping that no one would ask why I was taking it, and as I write this now I am once again wrapping it around my fingers. It’s comforting to feel the pressure of the elastic around my skin. It reminds me of the automated blood pressure cuff they have by the pharmacy in Target—when I lived in California I would take my blood pressure all the time just to feel the tightness of the cuff squeezing my arm, like a family member grabbing me by the bicep, reminding me how much I was loved, asking why I had moved so far away. I missed my family when I lived in California. I would sometimes take my blood pressure 4 or 5 times in one sitting and I never once bothered to check what my actual blood pressure was.

* * *

Last time I was at my grandparent’s house, which is now only my grandfather’s house, he was giving their things away.

“Take whatever you want,” he said.

Most of us took my grandmother’s watercolor paintings. My sister took two paintings of gnarled trees which she eventually had re-framed at A.C. Moore and which she put in her entryway outside the door to the kitchen. She took an antique lamp and something that looked like a small milk can that she would eventually put fake peonies in. My mother took a painting of a gasoline pump and a tiny figurine of Abraham Lincoln that she found in the kitchen. I took an original pencil sketch of my great and great-great grandfather, in which they are both wearing straw boater hats. I took the family photo from my great-grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in which my father, aged 12, is making the sort of ridiculous, obnoxious face that all 12 year-old boys make in important family photos. And then when no one was looking, I took one of the underpants waistbands that hung from her doorknob. The collection was (not surprisingly) untouched.

My father had been with his mother when she died, but the rest of us drove up to Utica for the services. We arrived at my uncle’s house and the first thing I thought as we pulled into his driveway was that it was strange being there under unhappy circumstances. My uncle’s house was where my cousin Elycia carried me around on her back and first warned me about boys and breasts and puberty (“They’re all just completely terrible,” she said) and where someone was always nailing someone else in the head (good-naturedly) with a tennis ball. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the side of the house, the heels of my dress shoes sinking into the wet grass. I looked out at my uncle’s backyard— a flat expanse of green lawn with what used to be a small tree that got in the way of our soccer and volleyball and badminton games but was now a medium sized tree that got in the way of nothing.

He had gotten rid of the above ground pool. I didn’t know you could get rid of above ground pools. I thought they were there for life—installed by burly men with tan necks; at once becoming part of the topography, the way lakes are formed by glaciers or mountains are pushed up from under the earth. But my uncle had gotten rid of the pool, which makes sense, given that all of his children are in their late twenties or early thirties, and the abdomen-high water in an above ground pool is only moderately entertaining, even to a nine year-old.

We entered the house through the garage—that was the same as it had always been. We always entered through the garage, passing through the laundry room, which led directly into the kitchen, which led directly into the room that used to have a reclining sofa (I had begged my mother to buy one but she said no) and an Atari, but now held a large dining table and a china cabinet. My cousins had arrived at the house first, also carrying packages. Everyone was wearing dark colors and hugging everyone else and talking softly.

We had spent the morning at the funeral home and everyone was wearing black or gray and those of us with pants were covered in a sheen of white lint from the balled up tissues we had shoved in our pockets. Tony and Joe and Mark had been pallbearers and they sat around the table in dark suits, which is not at all how I remember them. I do not remember any of my cousins becoming adults, but it happened at some point when I was not paying attention. We were sitting in the same room where, twenty years earlier, when the room had had a reclining sofa and an Atari, my father had filmed a home video of our family.

In the video Joey is maybe 6 or 7, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and continually commenting that he would like to grow up to be a truck driver who smashes cars into trees. Mark, who was a year older, was wearing a generic baseball shirt with the number 88 on the front, with a widow’s peak reminiscent of Eddie Munster and hair spiked violently enough to prevent birds from landing on it. Someone had given him a trick ice cream cone whose top would shoot off when you pushed a button, which he proceeded to shoot at the camera for the majority of the video. Mark is older now and as my mother’s friend commented, “very handsome!” and at the wake for my grandmother the funeral director would ask if he was Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark would say no, he wasn’t, and so the funeral director would ask if he had at least seen the movie “Titanic.” And Mark would say yes, he had, and would proceed to carry my grandmother’s casket toward the hearse.

We are all sitting quietly around the table, remembering my grandmother. Elycia is holding one of her two children and I remember back to when Elycia was ten, because in the video someone asks how old she is and she tells them using her fingers. In the video she has a ponytail and a shirt with two women on it and one of the women is looking at a man walking by and has a thought bubble that says, “What a hunk!” I remember that shirt because I wore it next, as a hand-me-down, and hated it. In the video Elycia is perpetually squinting into the camera, nose scrunched, as if staring into a solar eclipse. In the video we are all running tireless laps around the house, interspersed with appearances by my grandmother and exhausted cameos by our parents.

I am tightening the underpants waistband around my fingers, watching the blood drain from my fingertips. The top of the band is scalloped, which I hadn’t previously noticed, but I assume Hanes does this to distinguish them from men’s underpants. Whoever made the decision to scallop the top of women’s Hanes Her Way underpants might think that this detail has gone unobserved, and I want to look them up to tell them that no, it looks very nice, and that I have spent the last twenty minutes admiring their handiwork. I have been asked to write the eulogy for my grandmother and I have come to the conclusion that I will somehow derive inspiration from her underpants’ waistband—that within its elastic are insights into my grandmother’s life.

“What sort of things do you say in a eulogy?” I ask my mother.

“You could tell a story about the person,” my mother says, “or you could just talk about them in general—their traits or what you remember about them.”

“Any story?”

“Any story that’s appropriate.”

“Appropriate how?”

“Write something and I’ll tell you if it’s appropriate or not,” she says.

I begin the decision-making process over which of the stories about my grandmother to tell and which not to tell, which is hard because there are a great number of stories about her that are interesting and catchy and fun and these are the ones that in no way belong in a eulogy.
There are two stories about my grandmother that I would like to include. One is appropriate. The other is maybe inappropriate, but I am not positive. I am the type of person who holds onto her grandmother’s underpants’ waistbands, imbuing them with deep, emotional meaning, so I am probably not the best person to turn to during the “appropriate/inappropriate” decision making process. I have never had the best judgment. There is a scene in the home video where you hear my two year-old sister Karen crying off-camera as I, eight years-old and climbing up onto a stool beside my mother, say, “But she hit me with a tennis racket.”

* * *

My grandmother loved being the center of attention but in the home video she appears only briefly. My father approaches her with the video camera and as my father films her she is sitting in the corner, balancing her checkbook. She is wearing a bright orange and pink shirt because my grandmother loved bright colors and always dressed as though she were a citrus fruit or a collection of reflective traffic signs. She is wearing a sun visor over her perm and concentrating and my father’s voice says, “There she is! The woman who started it all,” and she looks up and smiles and my father goes, “Give us some attitude for the camera, Ena,” and my grandmother makes a face where she opens her mouth outlandishly, as if she has won a trip to Disney world, and puts her hands up in mock surprise. She shakes her torso back and forth, smiling, and remains on camera until my cousin Tony, who is twelve in the video, arrives in front of the camera from nowhere, making elaborate chewing faces.

“Tony, out of the way,” his mother’s voice calls from off screen.

My grandmother smiles excitedly for the camera again but Mark appears, doing an imitation of a Godzilla-type creature and other faces (mine, Pam’s, Elycia’s) appear from the background with various protruding tongues, blocking the camera’s view of her. She tries to shoo us, the way you wave away clouds of gnats but more grandchildren appear until the screen is filled with them and my father is forced to turn off the camera.

“Your grandmother liked being the center of attention,” my mother says.

“So do most of her descendants,” I say.

The appropriate story I wanted to tell was from when my grandmother was a little girl—she was the same age as my sisters and my cousins and I in the video my father made. The age at which we were running through the house like lunatics, screaming and tackling one another. I do not know if my grandmother was like this as a little girl but the fact that her seven grandchildren resembled (on a frequent basis) British soccer spectators initiating a riot, I can assume that she did not spend her entire childhood indoors doing needlepoint and practicing concertos. The story I told about my grandmother as a young girl took place in the 1920’s when her father’s wealthy friend visited her family in Tampa, Florida, which was where she grew up. Her father’s friend was a bachelor with more money than he could spend on himself and that first year he visited he took my grandmother’s oldest sister out on the town, buying her whatever it was she wanted—clothes and food and dolls, and all of the things that young children admire from store windows but can so rarely attain. And my grandmother looked on, excited.
Her father’s friend returned the following year, taking out the next oldest sister for a day of ice cream and candy and toys and my grandmother waited impatiently at home, told that next year would be her year. That next year it would be her turn. And my grandmother waited for him, eager, making a list of all the things she wanted—dresses and games and chocolate, and to travel around town in his car while people looked at and admired her. And she waited for him in the frantic way nine year-olds wait when they cannot contain their excitement, but the following year her father’s friend didn’t come back. She waited for him, buoyant, because my grandmother was always buoyant, but my grandmother’s turn came in 1929, which was not a wonderful year for rich bachelors who were heavily invested in the stock market. Her father’s friend lost his fortune in the crash but not all nine year-olds were privy to updated financial knowledge, and so my grandmother waited patiently, wondering why he had never come back for her. My grandmother, telling others the story, teetered between incredibly disappointed and abysmally heartbroken.

“Why would you tell that story?” my mother asked. “It’s so sad.”

“It’s not that sad,” I said. “It’s interesting.”

“It ends on a sad note.”

“But I like that story,” I said. I had always liked that story because she had first told it to me when I was very young and I had understood her disappointment so strongly. And because it was more appropriate than the other story I liked, which involved my grandmother driving somewhere with such determination that her van knocked the rear view mirror off a postal vehicle. And Mark, who was in the van with her, shouted, “Grandma, you knocked the mirror off that truck!” and my grandmother responded coolly, “Oh honey, don’t get worked up. The government’s got plenty rearview mirrors.”

* * *

We are sitting in the enormous Catholic church that is only a few blocks from my grandparents house, with my grandmother’s casket standing solemnly by the altar. The priest is saying a bunch of things about how my grandmother was wonderfully devout and my cousins are sitting together in a row of black suits and dresses, looking solemn. The priest mentions maybe thirty times that my grandmother is in heaven now and I am trying to think about my grandmother but my thoughts keep going back to the priest and how he could make his public speaking more effective by using emphasis and projecting his voice. I am sitting next to my father who has a small passage to read during the service that he is gripping uncomfortably. I have seen tears in the eyes of both my father and my uncle over the past few days. I can tell when they are about to cry because they will abruptly stop talking—even if they are in the middle of a sentence—they will stop talking for as long as it takes to subdue the sadness, and then they start again from where they left off, never acknowledging the silence. My aunt, my father’s sister, has been sobbing outright, and is in the front row next to my grandfather, her hand on his back to steady him.

My father goes up and reads his piece clearly, straining it of emotion, and walks back down to his seat. I am happy for him that he did not cry while he was reading it. I am up next and my father mouths the word S-L-O-W-L-Y and my mother mouths the word A-P-P-R-O-P-R-I-A-T-E and I walk to the lectern and begin to talk about my grandmother.

I am overwhelmed with the number of things I have to say about my grandmother and begin by saying that I loved her very much so if I cry forgive me, but that most of the memories I have of her are absurd and hilarious, so if I laugh, forgive me also.

I read the story about my grandmother as a little girl. I talk about her loopy handwriting and the little glass jars she used to collect from garage sales and one of the magnets on her fridge I had seen the other day that said, “If getting older is getting better, then I am magnificent.” I talk about how she used to love wearing hot pink and how she made quilts for all her grandchildren that weighed more than the lead aprons you wear at the dentist’s office but were less effective at keeping you warm, and how she would tell people “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” I say that if she IS in heaven, within a week all the angels will be wearing bright purple pants suits and enormous red hats, and that all the wall space in heaven will be taken up with watercolor paintings. I briefly mention the story about the rear view mirror and the postal vehicle and look for my mother’s face to make sure I am ok, that I am being appropriate, and my mother and my cousins are quietly laughing. And my grandfather is laughing gently and my aunt and her friends are laughing, and so are some of the other people in the church that I do not know. Anyone who is not laughing is smiling. I mention that if my grandmother is in heaven, I hope very much that she meets up with her mother and her father and both of her sisters, but that I also hope that she meets up with her father’s rich friend, and that he finally buys her toys and candy and ice cream and everything she’s ever wanted.

I finish with the eulogy and return to my seat. My grandfather, smiling, grabs me by the shoulders and says he had wanted to hop over the rail and hug me and that he thought it was a wonderful eulogy and I gave him a quiet kiss on the cheek. And then for a moment we are quiet. My cousins and my parents and my aunts and uncles, all of whom only twenty years earlier had been in front of a video camera shouting and waving their arms over their heads, did something I didn’t think my family was capable of doing—they stood completely still and fell completely silent.

And then, amplified tenfold in the acoustic horn of the church I learned that my grandmother had had only one request for her funeral service, which was that her casket be wheeled out of the church to a recording of New York, New York by Frank Sinatra.

If you have never listened to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in a church with wonderful acoustics, it is something I would recommend. The song thundered through the pews with its opening kickline of Broadway-style beats, a row of my Aunt Pam’s friends clapping along in the way my grandmother would have hoped for. My family gathered, alternately crying and laughing, blowing our noses and snapping our fingers, as his voice spilled out through the church.

Start spreeeading the news--
I’m leavin’ today.
I want to BE a part of it—New Yooork, New Yoork.

“She requested this?” I asked.

“Are you surprised?” my mother asked, wiping tears from her cheek with a folded tissue.

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

These vagabond shooes--
Are longing to straaaay
Right through the VER-Y heart of it
In old, New Yoooork!

My grandfather had tears in his eyes but continued smiling, his rosary beads clinging to his hand, and I reached down into my purse, feeling for the elastic of my grandmother’s underpants, which I proceeded to wind around my knuckles until I could feel the blood rushing into my fingers. We wheeled my grandmother down the aisle as she shouted that she wanted to wake up in the city that never sleeps. As she announced brightly, as she so often did, that she was both king of the hill and top of the heap and (if it’s not too much to handle) possibly even A#1. And as Sinatra wound down, the pallbearers, smiling, buckled their knees and lifted my grandmother into the air like ancient royalty. She rode out of the church on the shoulders of her loved ones, the well-deserved center of attention, without (for once) her grandchildren jumping in front of the camera, begging the cameraman for their fifteen minutes.

* * *

In the best part of the video—the reason all of us like watching it— my father questions us, one by one, standing against the white aluminum siding on the side of my uncle’s house. My sister Pam slides in to the frame, her dark brown hair hanging in her face as she tells the camera that she is six. My father asks, “What do you do for a living?” and she responds: “I fix garages.” And he says, “What do you want to be when you grow up? And Pam, declining to answer, sticks out her tongue at the camera before exiting.

And my father shouts, “Who’s next?” so that as Pam leaves, my cousin Mark walks on screen, three-and-a-half feet tall, his hair standing on end.

“What’s your name?” my father says, his voice playfully impatient, as if conducting a job interview where all the applicants who had shown up that day were under the age of ten.

“Mark.”

“How old are you, Mark?”

“I’m seven years-old!”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

Mark scratches his chin, smiling, looking pleased and horribly embarrassed. He is grinning. He shouts, “I don’t have one!”

And my father says, “What do you do for a living?” And Mark answers that he plays baseball.

And my father says, “Thank you very much. Next?”

He runs the gamut through my cousins and his own children, learning that Karen is two and that I am eight and want (at that point) to be a lawyer and that Joey, though embarrassed on-camera to reveal his fondness for dinosaurs, twice reiterates that when he is older he would like to have a fast car that he can smash into trees.

And I am sorry now that he never asked his mother to come out for her questioning—asking her to stand against the side of the house with everyone else who was itching to be captured on film. My grandmother would have gotten excited and opened her mouth wide, as if she were titillated and screaming, and would say, “My name is Ena Marquis D’Apice and I’m sixty eight years old!

And my father would offer a gruff, “What do you do for a living?” and my grandmother would say, “Honey, I’m an artist!”

And my father would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And my grandmother would fall silent for a moment, excited, forgetting that she had already grown up several decades earlier. We would watch her visibly thinking on camera, biting her lower lip, rifling through possibilities. She would go back and forth between President of the United States and Mouseketeer. Backup Singer for the Glenn Miller orchestra. Professional Artist. Queen of Everything.

And I am sitting here alone, thinking about my grandmother, wrapping the waistband of her underpants around my fingers. I took the waistband as a way to remember her idiosyncrasies but I find that within a minute of picking it up I am wrapping it tightly around my hand again, feeling pressure that makes the tips of my fingers pulse. That there is something comforting in the squeeze of the elastic, the same way there was something comforting in the blood pressure machine holding me firmly by the arm, assuring me things would be ok.

And I know she is gone. I watched her casket as it was lowered into the earth by burly men with tan necks. I am positive she is gone but the elastic is warm and tight and fused to my skin and it feels, I finally realize, like someone is holding my hand.

My grandmother is simultaneously buried in a small cemetery in Utica and dancing through all of our imaginations in a red hat. My father is filming her with the video camera against my uncle’s aluminum siding.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my father would ask.

“Give me a minute, honey. Give me a minute.”

And if she took too long, of course, my father would have said, “Ok, Next!” the way he did with everybody, but until that point he would capture her alone on camera, letting her enjoy the attention she craved—her bright pink shirt reflective against the white of the house, her face illuminated by a spotlight.

Things I Learned From Holly

2009-12-17T15:14:21Z

I am taking the seeds out of a Pomegranate the way I was shown by Holly, the forty-two year old woman who I worked with two jobs ago. You cut the Pomegranate into fourths, leaving the knife in what looks like a puddle of translucent, magenta-toned blood on the cutting board. You fill a large mixing bowl with cold water and roll up your sleeves. Rolling up your sleeves should maybe be the first step, but I inevitably forget to do it until later—sometimes until after I have already gotten them wet or stained with Pomegranate juice and am holding my dripping hands out in front of me, yelling to anyone within earshot, “Hey—can someone come in here and roll up my sleeves?” And I stand there, soiled and thankful, as my mother folds my cuffs back and pushes them past my elbows. I have lost two good shirts to pomegranate juice.

But roll up your sleeves and immerse one of the pomegranate pieces in the cold water, separating the white pulp from the bright, jewel-toned seeds. The seeds will sink to the bottom and the white pulp will float to the top, and the water will keep the juice from staining your palms, keeping you from looking like Lady MacBeth in the first scene of act five, which really is not such a great look for anyone. When I spilled things on myself as a child my parents would take the garment, running it under cold water, and chanting, “Out, out, damn spot!” I was seventeen years-old—a junior in High School, before I learned that the phrase “Out, out damn spot,” was not about getting food stains out of clothing. I was twenty-three before I learned how to open a Pomegranate. I do not know at what ages other people learned these things, or whether they learned them at all, so I have nothing with which to compare myself. I will assume, for the time being, that my experience is normal.

Holly introduced me to pomegranates. They were her favorite fruit, she said, and her husband would sometimes bring one home for her, the way other men would bring their wives bouquets of roses. When she said this I nodded quickly to give the impression of understanding, as if I received bouquets of roses all the time—as if the men hoping to meet me were lined up around the block, like the nannies in Mary Poppins who are eventually blown away by the wind.

I was twenty-three when I learned how to artfully open a pomegranate and I was twenty-four when I first went on a date, which was something no one had ever shown me how to do.
I knew nothing about dating. I had not had a great deal of luck with the opposite sex. The Dorothy Parker adage states, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I had discovered several unfortunate addendums, including: Men seldom make passes at girls who wear loafers, Men seldom make passes at girls who are constantly doing Walter Matthau imitations, and Men seldom make passes at girls who sit in front of their computer for nine hours, trying to beat their high score in Minesweeper.

I was not normal, and I knew that boys did not have crushes on girls that were not normal. I had learned from numerous 80’s movies that cool, popular guys would sometimes ask you to go to the prom with them, but when you actually arrived at the prom in your dress and corsage it would turn out to be a trick and the guy who had asked you out would be laughing at you, standing arm in arm with a popular girl who was usually blonde with feathered bangs and whose mother was ok with her wearing eyeliner. I spent a good amount of time horrified that I might find myself in this situation, and decided that the best way to avoid it at all costs was to avoid anyone who appeared to be interested in me. This led to a decade in which I became extremely adept at playing Boggle, Scrabble, and Tetris. Also, I read a lot.

My very first date ever was with someone I met online. I wore a brown cotton sweater from the Gap over a blue crewneck T-shirt. We went to a bar that had two bowls of pretzels to a table and beer advertisements from the 70’s on the walls, and he told me about himself and why he had moved to the area and what his plans were for the future. And the whole time I sat opposite him in my brown cotton sweater thinking, “I’m on a date! This is what a date is like!” And at some point he took a calm sip of whatever beer he had chosen and asked about me, and I answered cheerfully with what I realize now is the mortifying statement, “This is my first date ever!” And he exercised what must have been a great deal of restraint and said, “Ever?” And I said, “Yeah, ever!” And I do not remember specific details about him, such as his name or what he looked like, or anything he said over the course of the night, but when we parted ways he said, “I’ll call you,” which I remembered from the movies meant, “I will not call you.” And I parted ways with him the way I had parted ways with everyone up until that point. I smiled and extended my hand and told him it had been very nice to meet him and thanked him for coming out, grinning with a smile normally reserved for disappointing job interviews. And as expected, he did not call to ask for a second date. I assumed that my biggest mistake had been wearing the brown cotton sweater and the blue T-shirt. The sweater, I remembered, had never been particularly flattering.

At the job where I worked with Holly there was me and there were a lot of girls my age or a few years older, most of whom were blonde and lived in Hoboken, one of whom would not talk to me after she caught me eating popcorn out of the garbage can in my cubicle. (And I would like to clear my name by saying that the popcorn was not actually touching the garbage—it was still in the microwaveable bag in which I had popped it, and there was nothing else in my garbage can but computer paper, and I had initially thrown the bag away hoping that the act of putting it in the garbage would force me to stop eating it. But I had not really committed to throwing it away, since I had placed the bag, opening facing upward, gently on top of the garbage where it could easily be pulled back out. My paltry allotment of willpower is no match for the olfactory supernova of popcorn.) I liked Holly best out of the people in the office because she understood that there are certain circumstances under which it is ok to eat food out of an office trash can and she liked me because I understood that there are certain plays that cannot really be appreciated until you have seen them fourteen times, namely, the Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and anything starring Brenda Bleythn.

Holly’s husband, the one who would intermittently buy her pomegranates on a romantic whim, had worked in an office until he one day decided that he couldn’t go on working in an office any longer. And he had said, “I’m going to be a playwright.” And Holly had been a little nervous, because, as she reminded me, they had two children at that point, and the life of a playwright is not particularly lucrative, if it generates any income at all. But she had said, ok, we’ll try this, even though the whole idea sounded crazier than eating popcorn out of a perfectly clean garbage can, and he turned out to be a successful playwright, and now they lived together in their little house with the caddy corner piano in the living room, and the 1989 Volvo in the driveway.

When you fill out an online dating profile it is divided into two sections: what you are like, and what you are looking for, which might also be accurately labeled, “Outright lies,” and “horrifically unreasonable expectations.” My favorite online profile that I ever came across was a man who claimed to be a well-respected surgeon, who (when he was not saving lives by deftly cutting out tumors) was busy flying his private plane or playing catch with his 4 year-old Labrador retriever, Watson, throwing a tennis ball off the back of his deep sea fishing boat. He played in a band when he had the time, and had fond memories of his grandmother, and his favorite food was sushi, and his favorite movie was Finding Nemo. All of his photographs appeared to have been cut out of an L.L. Bean catalog.

An online profile will ask you to list a great deal of information about yourself and it is important that you be as accurate as possible, while being careful never to include anything unflattering or extremist. It is a pre-requisite of online profile composition that you include the line, “I love going out, but sometimes I also like to stay in.” People who do not enjoy both going out AND staying in are not eligible for online dating. The beginning of your profile will look something like the following:

· 24 year-old woman
· Brooklyn, New York, United States
· Seeking men 26-33
· Within 25 miles of Brooklyn, New York, United States

Sometimes it will ask you questions, such as, “What sort of music do you listen to?” and you have to be careful not to write something like, “I love Phil Collins and own two copies of the Tarzan soundtrack,” because even if it is true, very few people will read that sentence and fall head over heels in love with you. There will be some parts of the profile where you will get to write long passages about yourself and there will be some parts where they will offer you a series of boxes that correlate with people’s interests and will ask you to check all that apply.

I am interested in:
· Camping!
· Coffee and Conversation!
· Dining Out!
· Gardening/Landscaping!
· Movies/Videos!
· Museums and Art!
· Playing cards!
· Travel/Sightseeing!
· Wine tasting!

I found two pictures of myself that I did not think were terrible and uploaded them to the website. In the first one I am sitting in my office cubicle in a coat and scarf reading a book. In the second I am wearing a homemade Halloween costume, dressed as a “chick magnet,” clad in a chunky turtleneck sweater and jeans, which are covered in dozens of small, yellow chicks. For a brief period I put up a third picture, depicting Steve Carrell’s character from the movie “Anchorman,” but the site took it down, claiming that posting licensed photos was against site policy.

You pick photos that depict you as you would like to imagine you look every day. And you look over your profile to make sure it says all of the things you would like the world to know about yourself and that it reveals none of the things you were hoping to keep secret. And you look over your photographs, wondering if you have any that are better. And then you realize that this is it, this is all you have and all you are, and that maybe someone will like you and maybe someone will actively dislike you, but that most likely, no one will care one way or the other. You check back every few hours to see if anyone has left you a message, and most of the time nobody has.

I am pulling apart the pomegranate underwater, hundreds of clustered seeds nestling in its crevices. Pomegranates do not look like most other fruit—there is no meaty flesh to be scooped up by a melon baller, and you cannot bite through a thin skin, the way you can with a peach or an apple. The first time I saw the inside of a pomegranate, I thought that it had gone bad—that the pure white of the inside had been compromised by what appeared to be a series of thin red worms tunneling through the pulp.

“That’s a normal pomegranate,” said Holly. “That’s how they’re supposed to look.”

“It looks gross.”

“Try it.”

“It looks infested,” I said.

“Don’t be put off by how they look,” she said. “Lots of things look fine but taste terrible.”

Someone told me once that the apple that Eve samples in the garden of Eden is a mistranslation—that the actual fruit taken from the tree of knowledge is a pomegranate, which makes that particular creation myth more palatable. As a child my mother would pack me a bag lunch five days a week, consisting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, by my lunch period had been flattened to the thickness of a sparsely packed Fed Ex envelope) with a juice box and a Red Delicious apple, deep red and broad shouldered with a waxy shine to its skin. Every day she would pack me a Red Delicious apple and every day I would walk politely to the cafeteria garbage can, lift the lid, and deposit the apple as if I were mailing a letter. My mother purchased Red Delicious apples because they were inexpensive and because they didn’t go bad as quickly as some other varieties of apple, but failed to take into account that the reason they are so inexpensive is because in blind taste tests Red Delicious apples are indistinguishable from pieces of cardboard.

“You threw them away?” she asked, years later, after my confession that I had discarded thousands of untouched apples, all of which were nestled in a landfill somewhere, clustered like pomegranate seeds, covered by the thin membrane of the earth.

“I threw all of them away. They were bad. They were gross.”

“Red Delicious apples almost never go bad.”

And that was when I explained to her that Red Delicious apples do not “go” bad because they are already bad. That the word “Delicious” was included in the name to entice people to use them as something other than paperweights.

* * *

My first date that was not a complete train wreck was also with someone I had met online (Height: 5’11”, Eyes: Blue).

“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” I said.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. He was in his third year of a Ph.D. program and had a cat and liked comic books and we dated for three years, despite the fact that we had little to nothing in common aside from a love of spareribs and distaste for the movie “Seabiscuit.”

“How are things with Dan?” Holly asked occasionally. “Are you still together?” And I answered, “Yes,” for several years. And then at some point he realized that despite being in a relationship we were both lonely and not particularly well matched, and he broke it off. I was inconsolable for several months, at one point walking into a Ranch 1 Fast Food chicken restaurant and breaking into tears at the song, “My Boo,” being played over the loudspeakers.

And I would occasionally think of Holly and her wonderful family. Her husband, bent over his desk, scribbling endless pages of convincing dialogue. Her children asking if they could paint their rooms some horrible color like dark green or fluorescent orange and Holly politely telling them, “No, that is not such a good idea,” and the children exhibiting disappointment imbued with an absurdly mature level of understanding. Their home filled with warmth and good cheer and the innumerable things people hope to depict on holiday greeting cards. The last time I visited them at their house they were sitting around their Christmas tree, hugging each other. I wondered, at times, if I was visiting a co-worker or had undertaken a surrealistic journey through a Norman Rockwell painting.

* * *

I created a new online dating profile almost a year after my breakup, filled with fascinating tidbits about my personality (Pets I have: None! Pets I like: Dogs, Cats, Horses!) and forced myself to go out on dates. People would occasionally ask if all the bad dates blended together after a while, but I asserted that no, they were all unique in their awfulness. I had moved onto a new job in the city at that point and no longer worked with Holly, but e-mailed her occasionally to see how she was doing. She was always doing well, seeing Broadway plays and working and coming home to her two wonderful children and her cats and her two geckos and her wonderful husband who sometimes bought her pomegranates out of love.

I met a very nice guy online (Height: 6’0”, Eyes: Brown) who had curly brownish reddish hair and whose mother raised purebred dogs in Ontario. He was friendly and nice and we dated for a few months. He was many of the things I was looking for, which, rather than causing me to step up the intensity of the relationship, made me wonder whether the things I was looking for were horribly misguided. A friend of mine in college had once taken an evening and listed the traits of her perfect match—of her soul mate, she said. The list began with things such as:

· Funny
· Handsome
· Not allergic to dogs
· Gets along with my parents
· Kind

And in the middle it included things such as:

· Likes Thai food
· Speaks another language in addition to English
· Works in the music industry but volunteers at a Non-Profit
· Has a great singing voice

And at the end it included things such as:

· Has memorized the lyrics to “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel
· Favorite color is orange
· Second favorite color is brown
· Does not own anything from IKEA
· Is willing to watch my “When Harry Met Sally” DVD with me once every few months without complaining

And the very last bullet point, which is the only reason I remember her writing all this out in the first place, was the line:

· He should not meet all the criteria of this list.

* * *

The most ridiculous message I received while online dating was from a 33 year-old man living in Jersey City (Height: 6’2”, Eyes: Hazel) written under the subject line, “I hate puppies.”

“Hello,” he said. “I just read through your profile and thought, ‘Wow! I have never met anyone with whom I am so horribly mismatched and in whom I am so horribly uninterested.’ After going through your “About Me” section (and falling asleep several times, by the way) I made it to your “interests,” desperately hoping that you (like myself) are looking for a relationship based solely on a shared interest in seagull migration patterns and a passion for memorizing train schedules. That being absent, I thought that perhaps you were that person I have searched for all my life, with whom I could walk around lower-income Midwestern towns, buying antique Vaseline jars at garage sales. THAT being absent, I thought that perhaps you shared my disdain for adorable, large-footed puppies which, given the information in your profile, is also not the case.

All that being said,” he continued, “I really liked your profile and am horrible at writing to people online.”

I responded in the only way you can respond to a letter of that sort, which is to tell him that I was unable to write very much at that time, being that I was involved with a 3-day project involving Busby Berkeley choreography and tarantulas. And that the following evening I would have loved to chat, except that I would be busy translating the phrase, “Where have all the flowers gone?” into a number of Mayan dialects. And also, I confessed, in actual seriousness, that I was involved in a highly intensive online project that would be completed in two weeks. But if he would like to write e-mails back and forth for two weeks, that it would be a welcome break from the work. And he said “Fine,” and for the next two weeks I received lighthearted e-mails from him in which he pretended to be senator Chuck Schumer.

“I’m at home,” he said. “Watching this great Schoolhouse Rocks! special about how a bill becomes a law. I think I almost understand it. On Monday I’m going to try and explain it to Congress.”

And occasionally I would ask about one of the details of his actual life, wondering if I might learn something about him.

“You live in Jersey City?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

“What’s not to like about it?” he asked. “Jersey City is not only the birthplace of the toothpick, it’s also the first place where churned butter was genetically modified in our attempts to create a biological weapon in our epic struggle against the soviets. It’s also home to some of our most renowned scientists, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Jefferson Davis, E.O. Wilson and Georges Sand. Also, it was recently named ‘Happiest City in New Jersey’ by Jersey City Magazine—the first time it’s won the award in the publication’s 127 year history.”

“Are you ever serious about things?” I asked.

“I’m not wonderful at being serious,” he replied. “But I can try, if you really want me to.”

At the close of two weeks I asked if he would still like to meet up and he said yes, he would, very much. And he asked what sort of food I liked, and I said, “Anything except Indian food,” and he suggested Ethiopian food and since I did not want to appear to be an uncultured cretin, I said, “Yes, sure, Ethiopian food would be fine.” I remembered that in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” they go out for Ethiopian food and the movie ends well—with the two of them getting together, so maybe there is something about Ethiopian food that bodes well with budding relationships.

And I received the following message:

“So I’ll see you on Saturday night then. We can spend an hour or two chatting over Ethiopian food before leaving the restaurant in disgust (with each other—not with the food.) And then we can part ways and think about all the better ways we could have spent the evening."

Before I left the house I brushed my hair and put on a three quarter sleeve tomato-colored peacoat. I took the subway to West Fourth street and walked past the basketball courts and past the hardware store and past a parking garage and a nightclub called, “The Fat Black Pussycat.” I walked past dozens of people my age, some of whom seemed happy, some of whom seemed confused, sitting thoughtfully in pizza parlors or on stoops.

“So I’ll be able to recognize you?” I had asked. “You look like you do in your pictures?”

“Of course not,” he wrote. “I cut the pictures out of a Land’s End catalog that my mother was throwing away. I look nothing like any of my pictures. But meet me in front of the restaurant regardless—I’ll be the four-foot tall man in the Stegosaurus costume with the extending telescopic eye.”

“Ok,” I said quietly. “I’ll be the nine foot tall Elton John impersonator holding a taxidermied nightingale and reciting lines from Nicholas Cage movies.”

“Ok,” he said. “I will keep my eyes peeled. I am looking forward to meeting you.”

I am walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”

And I look up and standing politely by a doorway is a four-foot tall man in a stegosaurus costume, with an extending telescopic eye.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he says, through an electronic voicebox that translates dinosaur-style grunts into conversational American English. His eye extends slowly, protruding from his reptilian face, looking at me for the first time.

“No, stop,” my mother said, as I recounted the story. “Tell the actual normal story.”

“Ok,” I tell her.

So I’m walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”

“And?” a friend asks.

“And I turn around to see Senator Chuck Schumer, handing out informational pamphlets.”

“Stop it. How did the date go?”

“It went fine.”

“Was he normal?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

So here is what really happened. Really. I promise. I heard a voice say, “Raquel?” and I turned around and there was a regular person behind me.

“What did he look like?” my friend asked.

“He looked like Waldo.”

“Waldo who?”

“You know Waldo from the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ books.”

“He looks like Waldo?” she asked.

“A little,” I said. “And a little bit like Adrien Brody. If Adrien Brody and Waldo had a baby, he would look like that.”

“Ok,” she said.

I looked at his face. He was tall and thin. He was handsome, with very dark brown hair and hazel eyes and freckles across his face and his hands. I looked behind him for lists of his interests or habits or an additional “More About Me” paragraph, but there was nothing except himself, wrapped tightly in a black jacket, hands stuck anxiously in his pockets. He extended one of them for a handshake, and his warm glove enveloped my hand.

“I’m Jonathan,” he said, and I smiled and said, “You seem sort of like a normal, regular person.”

“I am one,” he said.

“That’s ok,” I told him. “We might still get along.”

I am peeling apart the pomegranate the way Holly showed me, and pushing out the seeds, watching them float to the bottom of the bowl. I put them in the refrigerator so they will be cold for later, which was not one of the steps that Holly taught me, but you are allowed to add additional steps if you want to. There is no universal pomegranate preparation agenda.

I place the seeds in the fridge. I was twenty-three when I first learned how to cut up a pomegranate and twenty-eight before I had someone with whom to share one. In a basket on the counter are two additional pomegranates and zero Red Delicious apples. Later today I will bring one of the pomegranates out into the living room where Jonathan is sitting on our uncomfortable futon, reading a book, and I will offer to share it with him. We will sit in front of the gas fireplace and eat pomegranate seeds. I think back to Holly with her warm, enviable house and the visible vapors of bliss that emanated from her cats and her children and her husband and herself. I think back to her kitchen table where she sat, most likely, when her family ate casseroles or take-out Chinese food or pizza, and to their cared-for Christmas tree, and to the warm feeling I got being near her family, even though I am always notoriously cold, even when wearing layers.

“Teach me how to do this,” I wanted to say. “Teach me how to have what you have.”

I will be thirty years-old when Jonathan and I get married and start our ridiculous life together, but I was twenty-three when I looked over Holly’s shoulder, desperately trying to learn the two things she understood so effortlessly: how to be happy, and how to be loved. There is a lot of trial and error involved. I squinted and pursed my lips.

“Like this?” I asked her.

“Not exactly,” she said. “Try again. Sometimes it takes a little while before you get it down.” I nodded, trying to take in an invaluable lesson and still get home in time to have dinner with my parents.

“Like this?” I asked.

“No,” she said, frowning. “Definitely not like that.”

I paused, discouraged.

“Try again,” she says.

“Like this,” I say, with conviction. “You do it like this.”

“That’s it,” she says. “Like that.”

New Kids On The Block

2009-11-17T14:18:09Z

The grass is dried and dead on the hill and I make a mental note to remember what it looks like because I can never remember, during the summer months, what the lawn looks like in January. I am pulling into the street and the entire backyard is like matted carpet with bare scabs of dirt where in the spring my father will sprinkle grass seeds. The grass now is a dull green, curled toward the earth and peppered with brown, all of it mushed into the hill by the footsteps of my parents and neighbors’ dogs.

I can never remember how it looks. I always think, “Winter. In winter the ground is white,” because I cannot, for whatever reason, grasp the seasons beyond the pictures from the wall of my first grade classroom. In winter, there is snow and in spring there are flowers. In summer there is a beach ball and surfing and the sun is wearing sunglasses and a hat. And in autumn the leaves turn colors and children wear sweaters and go back to school and there are pictures of pencils and apples and the equation, “1+1=2,” which is the sort of thing that you learn in school, writing with the pencil that was previously depicted.

The grass is dead on the hill and I can’t see beyond that because there is a woman in a minivan blocking my driveway. Her son is standing outside the door in a Rec Soccer Uniform and I have no idea if they are waiting for a bus or if he is getting out of or into the minivan. He is just standing there, with his thick wavy hair that looks a little bit like a toupee and his distended stomach and his too-dark eyebrows, blocking my driveway. I have no idea if he lives on this block now, which is strange because when I was younger, standing like an idiot in my own Rec Soccer uniform, I was preternaturally aware of every person who lived in each of the ten houses on my street. It is not hard to keep track of the people in only ten houses, particularly ones who have children, or give out good candy on Halloween.

Ours was the first of the ten houses: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York. Sometimes when we would write our address on a letter, Pam or Karen or I would add the extra, unnecessary specifications: One Almondgrove Court, New City, New York, United States of America, Earth, Our Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe and then we would think for a while to try and remember if there was anything bigger than the universe that we had learned about but forgotten.

Our mailbox had a hanging sign that said “D’Apice” and “#1” of which I was very proud and which somehow led me to believe that ours was the first house, not only on our cul de sac, but in the world.

“It’s the first house on this block,” my mother told me.

“I know,” I said, beaming.

“But there are other blocks,” she said, craning her neck down to make eye contact, to make sure I understood. “There are other blocks and those blocks also have houses that start with ‘One.’ So we’re ‘One’ Almondgrove Court, but there’s a ‘One’ Blue Willow Lane and a ‘One’ Red Hill Road. Do you understand?”

“I think,” I said, disappointment seeping through me, making me cold, as if I had waded into a puddle in canvas sneakers.

I had learned in school that counting begins with “One” and our address began with “One,” and so I lived my first seven years with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. Marisa Laks’ house was #15, and she lived several blocks away and my cousin Mark’s house in Tampa was 5312 Zallard Street, which seemed a high enough number to account for all of the residences between our house and Florida.

“So what are we the first of?”

“We’re the first of this block,” my mother said. “Of these ten houses.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh.”

The interesting houses (besides our own, of whose relative unimportance I was not convinced) were usually the ones with children: houses 3, 4, 10 and sometimes 2. The people in 3, 4 and 10 had children a few years younger than Pam that we could play with. The woman in 8 had a Labrador Retriever with cancer that she let loose to play with whomever, and none of us had a dog of our own, so we shared that one until it died, inevitably, of the gumball-sized tumors that filled its body.
House 2 was MaryAnn, who was five years older than I was and was our babysitter and Pam and I would walk across the street to her house, ringing her doorbell at eight or nine in the morning on a Saturday to see if she was interested in playing with us.

“I can’t,” she’d say. “I have to clean my room.”

“Maybe when you’re done,” Pam offered.

“It’s going to take all day,” she said. “It’s a mess.”

“Ok,” we said, and would walk off to find someone else who would pull the wagon or hold the other end of the jump rope or let us borrow their Whitney Houston tape.

MaryAnn cleaned her room all day, every Saturday, for seven and a half years. Pam and I discussed, while walking back to our driveway, how messy it must be.

The woman in the minivan wasn’t moving so I put on my turn signal to show her I was trying to pull into the driveway she was blocking. Her mouth went ‘Oh!’ and she pressed her palm to the closed window and mouthed ‘sorry!’ and I waved and mouthed the words ‘it’s fine,’ which wasn’t really intended for her to lip read since I also said ‘it’s fine’ with my face, smiling and tilting my head to the side and trying to look generally good natured. The woman herself seemed good natured, which was why I wasn’t angry, and she reminded me of Diane Wiest, who I like, especially in Parenthood in that scene where Steve Martin thinks her vibrator is a flashlight. The first time I saw that scene I didn’t know why it was funny, the same way when I first saw Big, I didn’t laugh when Tom Hanks jumps into the bunk bed and says, “I get to be on top!”

“It’s a bunk bed,” I thought. “Everyone wants to be on top.”

Pam and Karen had had bunkbeds and Karen had the bottom because she was the littlest and might fall off and Pam would slide her arm down the side of the bed each night in the dark, grabbing Karen and stealing her stuffed animals. If there is something lurking under your bed that is going to frighten and devour you in the middle of the night, it is under the bottom of the two bunk beds, unless your younger sibling is a cannibal. If the female actress from Big was ok with being on the bottom bunk, then she was probably an idiot, I figured.

I continue smiling at the woman while pulling into the driveway. The grass is definitely green and brown mixed, which is never what I picture when I picture dead grass. Not that I do that a lot—sit around picturing dead grass, but if you asked me to draw a picture of my yard in January, I would draw it covered in snow even though it isn’t like we lived in Alaska or Buffalo or anything, and there definitely wasn’t snow on the ground most of the time. If you forced me to draw a picture of my yard in January without snow, first of all, you would have way too much time on your hands, forcing people to do things like that, but if you forced me, I would draw all of the grass brown, stretched out in a field like that Andrew Wyeth painting with the girl looking at the farmhouse.

I punch the code for my garage door opener, which is my mother’s birthday, and walk into the house, which is empty. I plug in my cell phone charger, which is what I was out getting. I had left my cell phone charger at my sister’s house in Westchester and she was driving home from work in the Bronx where she teaches and had told me if I met her on the other side of the bridge she would give me the charger.

I plug in the phone and it plays two notes—DEE doh, and will play the opposite when I unplug it later—doh DEE. I look out the big living room window and that woman is still there, her son waiting beside her now in the passenger seat, and it occurs to me that Rec soccer is finished by January and that he must be wearing his Rec soccer shirt as a regular shirt, which makes me feel bad for him. He looks a little like E.B. who lived next door to us. I wonder if maybe it was EB and I wasn’t paying close attention but it couldn’t have been because E.B.’s mom doesn’t look anything like Diane Wiest and doesn’t drive a minivan and because anyway E.B. is probably in his early 20’s by now. When he was younger, maybe six, he idolized the sweaty, tanktop-wearing men who mowed all the lawns on our cul de sac. He would walk to our house in his own white undershirt that probably his mom had bought him and would ask if we needed him to cut the grass in the front yard. And we would say, sure, knock yourself out and he would tie a long sleeved shirt around his waist and push an empty baby stroller up and down our lawn, making wheel-creases in the grass.

My phone makes a noise—not the noise of it being unplugged, but the double beep of a text message, which is from Pam, which says, “It was good to see you, sissa” with an emoticon smiley face. I had seen her for only a few minutes, our cars sitting next to each other, window to window, in the parking lot of a Hess station. She had an abrupt, shoulder length hairstyle with side swept bangs and was wearing a khaki raincoat.

“I like your haircut.”

“Thank you,” she said, pulling the phone charger from her purse. The cord was much longer than she or I realized and she continued to extract it, eyes wide, like a magician doing an exceptionally boring trick, sponsored by Verizon. She handed it to me, part of it dropping to the pavement between our cars.

“Thank you,” I said, peering into her car, which is full of small packages and bottled water and Ann Taylor Loft bags. “What’re the boxes?”

“Packages I’m sending to our platoon.”

My sister and her first grade class have a platoon of soldiers to whom they send playing cards and Starbursts and SuDoKu puzzles.

“It’s our final shipment before they relocate.”

“What’s the thing on top?” I asked, pointing to a much larger box and my sister’s eyes got very wide, the way they do when she tells the story of how some idiot woman cut in front of her on the Saw Mill Parkway or used a hundred dollar bill to buy a single doughnut at the pastry place across from her house.

“That,” she said, is from my principal. “The platoon asked if we’d send them toys for them to hand out to the Iraqi children. Like crayons or action figures or like—you know—something they can carry on them and give out. Because there are always kids around and they wanted something to give them.” She took a swig from her water bottle and continued.

“So my principal,” she went on, “MISSES Morganstein, brings me this.”

Peering in, I glance at the cartoonish letters off the front of the box, which read, “Baby Gymnastics Bounce and Spin Zebra.”

“It’s really big,” I said.

“It’s huge!” she cried. “Is she thinking?” My sister calmed herself, resting her face on the tips of her fingers. “Are the soldiers going to walk around carrying that? Are they going to take it with them in the tank?” She shook her head.

I smiled and lowered myself back into my own car, the window still rolled down and Pam said, “Wait!” and smiled and threw two small boxes of strawberry flavored Nerds into the car window, and said, “for your trouble!” and we blew kisses at each other and drove off in different directions.

I text Pam back saying, “Nice to see you too,” staring out the window at the mint green house across the street where Phillip Cleary used to live and where Phillip and Pam and I got yelled twice—the first time for walking on the pool cover and second for putting Scotch tape on his 6 month old sister’s nose so it looked like a pig’s nose. And we had taped all our own noses up too, thinking it was funny, but it wasn’t funny, my mother told us, it was dangerous. She forced us to write apology notes to Mrs. Cleary, with Pam, who only knew capital letters, writing “IM SORRE,” and putting about a thousand prongs on her capital E, which she always did, so that it looked like a fine tooth comb or a millipede.

The minivan’s red brake lights go on and exhaust begins sputtering from the tail pipe as another boy who had come down the street from somewhere—I have no idea which house—slides open the back door and scrambles onto the seat. I peer up the street, hoping to see where he lives. I am looking for a still-closing screen door or a yard strewn with bigwheels or a driveway marked with chalk drawings of flowers and tic-tac-toe boards. I listen for the sound of someone burping the alphabet or falling off a bike but there is nothing; the block is a graveyard. The minivan pulls up toward the street, idling at our bus stop, across from MaryAnn’s house, which now houses only MaryAnn’s mother and older sister, who works for the cable company. MaryAnn herself has married a soldier stationed in Hawaii, where she hopefully has a reasonably neat bedroom that she does not need to clean every weekend.

My mother arrives home later, putting her keys on the key hook and asking if I will help her unload the car.

“Are there kids who live on this block?” I ask.

“A couple,” she says. “I see kids around sometimes.

“I saw this kid I didn’t recognize,” I say, “and I was trying to figure out if he lived here.”

Looking out the window, I wonder if maybe the boy left footsteps from his front door to the edge of his lawn, but the grass is so dead and gross and matted down you couldn’t really tell where someone had stepped on it even if you were really looking. It would be easier if there were snow on the ground, I think. Not enough snow for a two-hour delay or school cancellation, but just enough to follow his footsteps back to his front porch, to whatever house it is that he will someday say he grew up in—the one that he is certain is number one in the universe. I would follow his bootprints across numerous yards, back to the garage filled with outgrown hockey skates and to the driveway littered with small helicopters and Frisbees, and to the doorbell—covered in decades of hopeful fingerprints—that the other kids ring when they ask if he can come out and play.

Work

2009-10-13T13:15:02Z

I took the job because I knew it would be temporary. In the interview the woman asked, “So you’re ok with getting here early?” and I confidently replied, “I’ve always been a morning person,” which, for the record, is true. I have always been a morning person, but being a morning person means only that I wake up around 7AM feeling refreshed, able to start my day without the use of coffee or high-strength amphetamines. It does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that I naturally wake up at 3:45 in the morning, ready to go jogging, write enigmatic haikus, or head off to a job that begins at 5AM.

I took the job at 5AM because I was desperate. It was a position in the lobby of a newly-opened hotel serving the continental breakfast. I imagined, upon taking it, that the other people working at a low-status job beginning at five in the morning would be plucky college students—a sub-genus of traditional human beings whose members do not appear to need any sleep at all, but who are always in desperate need of spending money. If not college students, I expected that the job would be staffed mainly by traditional train-riding hobos, stopping in New York for a month or two in their patched, tattered pants, hoping to make a few dollars before stowing away in a cattle car on the way to Carson City, Nevada. On the first day I arrived at work, I walked to the breakfast room to find a quiet, pale girl in a navy crewneck sweater. She was wearing horn-rimmed glasses made out of actual horn. Prior to taking the 5AM croissant-dispatching position, she had worked as the head speechwriter for a nationally known non-profit organization. Her name was Kim and she was thirty-one years-old.

The room in which we were stationed would eventually become one of the deluxe hotel rooms, with a large bathroom at the end where Kim and I arranged our coffee-making supplies. “So I’m supposed to be training you,” she said quietly, sitting atop two milk crates with her hands folded in her lap, “but there’s not really much to explain. We have two hot-water jugs that take about 8 minutes to boil the water, so just keep filling them up—I use the bathtub faucet since it’s a little faster than the sink. You fill the measuring cup up to here,” she said, marking a line with her bony index finger, squinting to read the measurements on the coffee scoop. “You fill it to here with coffee grinds and put them in the French press, and then hit the timer for one minute. After a minute you break the crust that forms on top and put the lid on the French press and then after three more minutes you push down the plunger. That’s everything,” she said. “And I just do it often enough so that we never run out of coffee.”

She looked at me earnestly with her pale blue eyes and we nodded at each other the way people who have taken advanced literature courses nod at each other when describing how to boil water taken from a bathtub faucet.
“I think I’ve got it,” my look said. “As sure as the protagonist in The Awakening takes her own life, I think I will be able to brew something resembling coffee, and transfer the finished product to a large push-handled thermos.”
Kim returned my gaze with a look that said, “We’re in this horrible situation together. We’ve both taken a mind-numbing early morning job, but unlike the young boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we will remain united and work together to keep from killing each other and everyone around us.” The room was still devoid of guests and silent and we sat patiently, alone with our thoughts and a large tray of croissants. Kim blinked softly, sighing, as we watched the sun tentatively rising over the streets of the endless, waking city, and I thought of the Emily Dickenson poem I was assigned to read for three separate classes.
“I’m nobody,” it begins. “Who are you?”

When I was younger and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I knew only of the positions listed in children’s books with titles like, “Where Does Daddy Go Each Day?” or “What Will I Do When I Am Big?” I think back to my small fingers turning the cardboard pages, each printed with pictures of firemen and police offices and ballerinas and astronauts—books of this sort list only professions with colorful, easily-identifiable uniforms. When I realized that I would never be a ballerina (pink leotard, pale pink tights) or a tugboat captain (yellow slicker, long gray beard) I embarked on what has now become a thirty-year journey for the thing I am supposed to do.

The thing I am not supposed to do, I said to myself as I placed a hand-lettered sign reading “Teabags!” on the buffet, is getting up for a 5AM job in a hotel near the Flatiron building. At least not forever. Kim had left her speechwriting position with the non-profit after growing disillusioned with politics and was studying to become a nurse practitioner. Another girl who worked only two days a week was supplementing the income from her organic housecleaning business. The third co-worker was male, and was working as a cater-waiter. He was thirty and very kind and loved to read and talk about the world. None of us had any idea what we were doing.

The first thing that changes when you have a job where you must get up at a ridiculously early hour is your schedule. You are no longer an at-work-by-9, leave-by-five, get home and watch TiVoed episodes of “The Office” type of person. You begin by forcing yourself to go to bed at eleven, lying wide awake in bed with the blankets force-pulled up to your chest, as if it were the weight of the blanket or the traditional “Night Before Christmas” slumbering position that would soften your body into sleep. It is not.
You stare at the ceiling thinking about how early you must wake up the next morning and doing the math in your head as to how many hours of sleep you will get if you could only fall asleep right Now! Or Now! Or at least Now! And at whatever fateful moment it happens, your eyes close and almost immediately open because it is 3:45 and your alarm is going off. I set an alarm for 3:45 and another alarm for 3:50, and when the second alarm goes off, I get up. I worry that if I fall back to sleep, I will not wake up until two in the afternoon.

The people staying in the hotel are very nice and friendly and come from all over.

“There was a guy here with the greatest job ever,” Kim told me one morning. We were sitting on the rim of the hotel room’s claw foot bathtub, waiting for the hot water to boil. I was pulling the pillowy insides from a croissant, letting flakes from the crust land on the white porcelain of the tub. Kim continued, her hands wrapped around a white coffee cup.
“I was talking about dream jobs with this young couple from Seattle and this guy getting coffee smiles and tells me that he moves yachts for a living.”

“He moves yachts?”

“People who are really rich and buy yachts but don’t know how to drive them hire him to move the yachts around from place to place.”

“That’s a real job?” I asked.

“That’s his only job,” she said. “He makes all his money moving other people’s yachts around. He gave me his card.”

“So he’s a yacht captain?”

“Sort of,” she said. “I think.” But they’re not his yachts. Someone will just say, ‘Hey, my yacht is in Puerto Vallerta and I need you to get it to Miami,’ and they pay him to drive the yacht there.”
I toyed, for eleven seconds, with the thought of becoming a yacht captain before recalling my reaction to the ending of the movie The Perfect Storm. Shuddering, I remembered that, rather than tackling vast, unending expanses of water, I should confine myself to jobs where I handle only a thermos of it at a time.

“He’s driving a yacht from Sweden to New Zealand,” Kim added. “He seemed really genuinely happy.”

I leave my apartment with the hopes of making a 4:18 train, walking past a lot of silence and a number of overflowing garbage cans. I have a ‘Good Morning’ person now when I walk to the train, which is nice. Initially I had thought I would be walking completely deserted streets, glancing up at silent 4AM windows with pulled roman shades, everything in the town unmoving except myself. I had not thought anyone else would be awake at this time, but every morning at the time I am walking past the corner deli, a man is walking out of it with a cup of coffee. He is small and has a handlebar moustache and is always wearing a flimsy cap with a polo shirt and khakis. He is Hispanic, but I don’t know from what country because the only thing I have ever said to him is “Good morning,” which is code for, “Look at us! We are the only two people in this entire town who are awake! We are like that couple in the Edward Hopper “Nighthawks” painting, alone in the yellow glow of this coffee shop! How ruggedly thrilling!” And the man always nods and smiles genially and says, “Good morning.”

When I arrive in the PATH station I squint to adjust to the light and am always surprised to see the number of people riding the train, each of them hunched forward—their backs curved with fatigue. It is an enormous tunnel—an underground lair where the early risers sit patiently, resting their eyes or reading a novel. Before moving to Jersey City I took a subway to work from Brooklyn, and immediately upon starting up (there are a few trains that do this) the subway would make a series of noises that exactly corresponded to the opening notes of “Somewhere” from West Side Story, which is the song that begins, “Theeeeere’s a plaaace for us.”
The subway never plays the whole song, only the first three notes. “Theeeere’s a plaaace,” and then on the word “place” the similarities between the song and the arbitrary subway noises would stop, but I would find myself singing the song for the remainder of my trip.

“There’s a place for us
somewhere a place for us
peace and quiet and open air
wait for us…somewhere.”

In Jersey, riding the PATH train, there is no music—only the overhead PA system announcing that it is the voice of Debbie DuHaime and that we should please be careful with any unmarked bags or packages we find lying around. No one can process words at that time in the morning and her voice is nothing more than a loud thunderbolt beating us about the ears going, “Maybe if you had a little more direction in your life you wouldn’t be here at this hour. You’d be in a comfortable studio at 2 in the afternoon, making a recording of your voice with the hope that it will be played at unreasonable volumes in early morning train stations.”
The people do not even look up.

The train I take goes from the Grove Street stop to 33rd street in Manhattan. I take it all the way to the end, sitting neatly in my ironed shirt, holding a book and balancing my bag on my lap. I exit the train when it says, “33rd street. This is the last stop. All passengers please exit the train,” and I leave, along with other people who are going to early morning jobs in their ironed shirts with their briefcases. Sitting on the benches, waiting to board the train we have just vacated, are a number of people, many of them in halter tops, vomiting. Some merely have their head between their legs and have not yet spewed seven hours of Martinis and Guinness onto the floor of the train station. Some rest their faces on their forearms, a small foul puddle to the right of a dressy shoe.

They will take the PATH train back to the stop that I have just come from and they will wake up hours later with a horrible hangover, wondering what they’re doing with their lives and where it was that they went wrong. This is one of the things the vomiting people and I have in common. There are numerous things we do not have in common, such as the fact that I have to be awake for work at the time they are coming home from the bars, and the fact that I do not own nearly as much glitter-based eye makeup.

The group with whom I wait for the train does not vary overwhelmingly from day to day. There is the girl with the henna-colored hair who usually wears dark colors and carries a small shoulder pocketbook clutched in her armpit. There is the man in the delivery uniform who ushers his bicycle onto the train carefully, slowly, as if he is holding the hand of an old man, encouraging him to take his first steps after hip surgery. There is the elderly Asian woman who is forever filling in SuDoKu puzzles with her thin, drugstore pen. I stare across the station at a sleeping woman who I think is from the Phillipines, but I am not positive. For a moment she opens her eyes and looks back at me, but after a few seconds her eyes close again, her lashes descending like a graceful kick line of thorns. She has incredibly long, dark hair and I imagine that if she wrapped it around her body enough times she would look like she was engulfed in a tornado, with nothing visible but her round, sleeping face.

We all solemnly step onto the train when it arrives. I will normally read, unless I am too tired, in which case I will sleep or look at the other people in my car, wondering what they do for a living, looking for obvious clues. Construction hard-hats tethered to the backpacks of sleeping men in sweatshirts. Two men in polo shirts bearing the name of a local moving company. A woman in the uniform of a cleaning business, yawning with closed eyes, sitting with posture as dignified as the hour will allow. I wonder, if I were to walk into the adjoining car if there might be a ballerina in leotard and tutu, her eyes closed, her head resting on the pane of glass behind her, vibrating slowly as the train sped through tunnels. I keep my eyes peeled for a fireman or tugboat captain or a black-robed white-wigged judge, tapping his or her foot impatiently, reading the ads posted above the seats. The next car over, I imagine, holds a movie star with enormous sunglasses and a smile as white and generic as computer paper, sitting beside a thoughtful, hay-chewing cowboy, sitting beside a nun, all of them watching as an astronaut floats placidly past the conductor’s window. The following train cars hold teachers holding red apples and writers with black typewriters atop their knees and a sharp looking man with a small flag pin in his lapel holding a sign that reads, “You could even become the President! There is nothing you can’t do if you believe in yourself!”